Schema Management

Overview

The Schema settings page lets you tailor your project's structure to match the Drupal site you're planning. Not every project needs every entity type — a simple marketing site might only use Content Types and Media Types, while a complex editorial platform might add Paragraph Types, Views, Components, and custom contributed entity types.

Open Schema settings from Project Settings → Schema. The page has three sections: Schema Tabs (your current sidebar tabs), Available Entity Types (registry entity types you can add), and Custom Tab Types (user-defined entity types).

Schema changes require the project:settings permission, which is granted to Admin and Owner roles. Members can view the schema page but cannot modify tab configuration.

Default entity types

When you create a new project, Strata automatically provisions sidebar tabs for all built-in Drupal entity types. These system tabs cover the standard Drupal content architecture:

The first five (Content Types, Taxonomy Vocabularies, Media Types, Block Types, and Paragraph Types) are fieldable bundle types — they support inline Fields, Form Displays, and View Displays. The remaining tabs track configuration entities that have their own column schemas but do not host fields.

System tabs cannot be removed from a project. You can hide them from the sidebar (see Tab ordering), but their data and structure are always preserved.

Adding entity types from the registry

The Available Entity Types section shows bundleable, fieldable entity types from your project's registry that do not yet have a sidebar tab. These are typically contributed Drupal entity types provided by modules in your registry — for example, if your registry includes a module that defines a custom entity type like product, it will appear here.

To add an entity type, click Add tab next to it. Strata creates a new tab type with the standard bundle column schema (Label, Machine Name, Field Prefix, Description, field count, and Notes) and adds it to the end of your sidebar. The new tab gets its own bundle management interface with full fields support, just like the built-in Content Types or Media Types.

Each available entity type shows its label, machine name, and the module that provides it. Only entity types that are both bundleable and fieldable can be added as tabs — non-bundleable entity types (like users or files) are filtered out.

Removing a registry tab

Registry-added tabs (marked with source community) can be removed by clicking the X button on the tab row in the Schema Tabs section. Removal is only allowed when the tab has no active entries — you must delete all entries first. System tabs cannot be removed.

Removing a tab permanently deletes all associated entries and their audit history. This is an irreversible operation gated at the Admin permission level.

Custom tab types

Custom tab types let you define entirely new entity types beyond what Drupal and its contrib modules provide. This is useful for tracking project-specific structures — for example, API endpoints, design tokens, migration mappings, or any tabular data your team needs alongside the content architecture.

Creating a custom tab type

Click New Tab Type in the Custom Tab Types section. Fill in:

• Label — the human-readable name (e.g. “API Endpoints”)
• Slug — auto-generated from the label, used as the internal identifier. Must start with a letter and contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores. Cannot be changed after creation.
• Description — optional text explaining the purpose of this tab type
• Columns — define the data columns beyond the automatic Label and Machine Name columns

Every custom tab type automatically includes a Label and Machine Name column. You only need to define additional columns specific to your entity type.

Column types

Each custom column has a type that determines the input control and validation:

For each column you can also configure whether it is required and whether it is visible by default in the table view. Select columns require you to define the available options (value/label pairs).

Editing and deleting

Click the pencil icon on a custom tab type to edit its label, description, and column schema. The slug cannot be changed after creation. You can add, remove, or reorder columns at any time.

A custom tab type can only be deleted when it has no active entries. Deleting a tab type removes both the type definition and its sidebar tab from the project.

Tab ordering and visibility

The Schema Tabs section shows every tab currently in your project — system tabs, registry-added tabs, and custom tab types — in their sidebar display order.

Reordering

Drag tabs by the grip handle on the left to reorder them. The order you set here is the order they appear in the project sidebar. Click Save changes to persist the new order.

Visibility

Toggle the eye icon to hide or show a tab in the sidebar. Hidden tabs keep all their data — entries, fields, and displays are preserved. They simply do not appear in the navigation. This is useful for entity types you want to plan later or that are not relevant to the current phase of architecture work.

Renaming

Click the pencil icon next to any tab label to rename it inline. The rename changes the display label only — the underlying tab type slug and data are unaffected. Press Enter or click away to confirm, then click Save changes.

Each tab row also shows the number of active entries it contains, giving you a quick overview of your project's scope.

Next steps

• Read Content Architecture for details on fields, displays, and entity reference configuration
• Learn about the Registry to understand how entity types, field types, and plugins are managed
• Set up Team Collaboration with roles and permissions
• Export your content architecture with the Manifest & Export documentation