The Entity Fields Builder module enhances Drupal's standard "manage fields" interface, making it possible to quickly add multiple fields to a content type or other fieldable entity, using field templates based on properties of standard content schemas such as the ones available at Schema.org. The advantages of standardized, schema-based field definitions include:

  • Better searchability. Using the Schema.org module, you can automatically and easily add markup to web pages that enables search engines to better recognize the semantic meaning of the content on those pages. This provides search engine optimization. Major search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! have agreed to recognized Schema.org-based markup in order to improve the display of search results.
  • Better interoperability. The Schema.org module provides RDFa markup, which means that the content on web pages can be extracted automatically using the SPARQL query language or as Google Rich Snippets. In effect, other websites and applications can use your Drupal site not just as a source of web pages, but as a sort of database from which information can be queried and programmatically retrieved.
  • Easier site building. The standard Drupal fields UI requires you to add fields to a content type or other entity one field at a time, through a process that requires you to visit three separate screens for each field that you create. The Entity Fields Builder module lets you add multiple fields by simply clicking on a check boxes for each field that you want to add, while still giving you all of the flexibility and options of the conventional fields UI.
  • Less rework. Using standardized schemas and naming conventions makes it easier to be consistent when naming and defining entities and fields. Using Schema.org design patterns can therefore help reduce some of the inefficiencies that occur when Drupal developers are asked to do essentially the same thing on multiple client projects. For example, you may be asked to define a content type named “Event.” Usually the fields defined for this content type are very similar to the fields defined for an Event content type that you or someone else built on a previous project. It would be nice if the code that was written when building that previous project could be reused, but often this is not possible because of discrepancies in how fields were named or other trivial differences that become blockers to code sharing and reuse. The Entity Fields Builder module can help eliminate those blockers.

This module is designed to work in conjunction with the Schema.org and Schema.org cache modules for Drupal, but it is extensible and could be used with other sources of schema information as well.

Here's a video demo explaining the purpose of the module and showing how it works:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY0NJgDMtC0

(If you want to skip straight to the part showing how EFB works, that part starts about 6:30 minutes into the video.)

There is also a Schema.org kickstarter installation profile (currently available on Github) which can be used to quickly set up a Drupal instance with the Entity Fields Builder module already installed and working:

https://github.com/sheldonrampton/schemaorg_kickstarter

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