Installation Guide

The Schema.org Blueprints module and sub-modules should be installed as you would install a contributed Drupal module.  

It’s essential to understand that the Schema.org Blueprints module provides a set of tools to create perfect data structures (Schema.org), pristine APIs (JSON:API), and great SEO (JSON-LD) within the best content authoring and administration user experience. 

To achieve these goals, the Schema.org Blueprints module includes a lot of sub-modules and APIs that provide features, enhancements, and integrations using a composable modular architecture. Before getting started, you should understand what Schema.org is and how to compose a Drupal website. This core understanding allows you to explore using the Schema.org Blueprints module, and to create and manage a content model and architecture that is standardized and understandable by people, machines, and search engines.

Invest the time necessary to understand that each sub-module provides a feature, integration, or enhancement built on top of the main Schema.org Blueprints module. For example, the main module integrates Schema.org's schemas and provides services to create entity types and fields. However, you need to install the Schema.org Blueprints UI to generate mappings, entity types, and fields using Drupal's administrative UI. You should also install the report, mapping set, and export modules to help your content architects fully understand Schema.org, and plan your organization's content models. Depending on how you want to build your Drupal application, you must also decide whether to install the taxonomy, media, paragraphs, layout, metatag, and translation support and integration modules.  

Building a great and maintainable Drupal application is a complex and sometimes overwhelming task. The Schema.org Blueprints module is a tool to help your organization build and maintain a standardized and easy-to-understand content model within an excellent content administration and authoring experience.

Please, take your time to understand the Schema.org Blueprints module, and please don't be afraid to ask questions and share your feedback.

Below are some prerequisites, recommendations, installation, and configuration tips.

Prerequisites

• Watch the short and long demo videos.
• Review the project page and documentation.
• Research and understand what is Schema.org?
• Understand the goals of the Schema.org Blueprints module.
• Define the goals of your Drupal application.
• Know how Drupal's entity and field system works.
• Be comfortable creating content types.
• Be open to taking a different approach to building content models.
• Be open to experimenting with and rebuilding a Drupal instance until it is correct.

Recommendations

• Use Composer to install and manage dependencies.
• Use the composer merge plugin to install dependencies and recommended patches via composer.libraries.yml.
• Read all the sub-module descriptions in MODULES.md and review each module's README.md file. 
• Review Drupal's Help (/admin/help) section, which includes every Schema.org Blueprints module's README.md file.
• Become familiar with navigating Schema.org.
• Enable the Schema.org Blueprints Report module and review the 'About Schema.org' pages (/admin/reports/schemadotorg).
• Experiment with creating individual Schema.org mappings and types.
• Use the Schema.org Mapping Set module to create sets of related Schema.org types with relationships.
• Recognize that every aspect of the module (and Drupal) is configurable.
• Set up Schema.org types from general to specific. For example, create a https://schema.org/Person who would attend or host an event before creating an https://schema.org/Event. 
• When getting started, use the Paragraphs module during experimentation and move to other entity types and systems (including Storage) as needed.
• Use the Schema.org Blueprints Demo module and scripts to enable different feature sets.
• Use Drush commands to set up, test, and teardown full content models using mapping sets.

Installation

• The Schema.org Blueprints module consists of a core module with a few dozen sub-modules.
• When building entity types, most sub-modules should be enabled on development servers.
• Review the MODULES.md file, which lists different groups of modules that should be installed to assist with the initial creation of Schema.org types with other enhancements.
• In production, only a few modules are required. For example, the Schema.org Blueprints JSON-LD module needs to be enabled for SEO.

Configuration

• The Schema.org Blueprints module ships with a reasonable default configuration, however everything is customizable and configurable.
• Review all Schema.org Blueprint configuration settings.
• Module-specific settings are grouped together.
• Configuration can be edited via the UI and exported YAML file.