How to create a custom content type

How do you want to publish news items to your users?  

Is it something you could do with the existing blog application?  If so, a new content type is not necessary.  New content types should only be created for new applications, not repurposed ones (since blog posts are already a content type).

Hi Ben,

The goal I'm trying to reach is that we can publish product as well as news items to our users. The existing blog application provides us all the functionality we need (such as commenting etc.), but we do need to handle our products differently from our news items. We need to create seperate lists, want to display them both on their own way, and want to be able to search within only products or only newsitems.

So, within a group we would like to provide:

• q&a (possible out-of-the-box)
• forum (possible out-of-the-box)
• products (could be based on blogs)
• news (could also be based on blogs, but must be handled seperatly from products) 

If a custom contenttype is not the way, what should be the way to reach this?

A group can contain multiple instances of an application - in your case you could have two blogs "Products" and "News".  

What you do beyond that sort of depends on exactly the level of separation you want.  A few thoughts off the top of my head:

* You can have different page layouts for different blogs within a group.  (This is not however supported for forums, wikis and galleries)

* You can customise the navigation to show separate links for your news and products blogs.

* When you use a Blog - Post List widget, you can configure it to pull from a specific blog, rather than all blogs in a group / the contextual blog.

Alex, thanks for your answer.

I'm working with rotzen on the same project. But what if the 'Product' needs to have a SKU, color or weight property I want to filter on?

This could be done via tags, but that feels like abusing the tags field for something not intended. (and not possible to get all products between 2 and 10 kg/lbs)