Drupal WOWs - Episode 2 - Self-Referencing Entities in Drupal for Related News

Drupal WOWs is a quick and short video series that introduces non-Drupal techies to some of the platform’s most powerful and unbelievable no-code features.

In this episode of Drupal Wows, we continue exploring one of Drupal's most elegant content relationship features - self-referencing entities. This powerful capability allows news articles to reference and connect to other news articles within the same content type, creating a web of related content without any custom coding.

How It Works

As shown in this graphic, the NEWS content type includes a parent_news_id field - a foreign key that references back to the same table. This self-referencing relationship enables several content scenarios:

Follow-up Stories: When major news breaks (like "New AI Technology Released"), subsequent articles can reference the original story. Updates about pricing, industry analysis, and user reactions all link back to the parent story, creating a natural content hierarchy.

Related Articles: News pieces covering similar topics can cross-reference each other, helping readers discover relevant content and keeping them engaged on your site longer.

Story Threads: Complex stories that unfold over time can maintain their connection, allowing readers to follow the complete narrative from initial report to final resolution.

The Drupal Advantage

What makes this truly impressive is that Drupal handles all the complexity behind the scenes. Content editors simply select related articles from a dropdown or autocomplete field following some content modeling effort by the Site Builders. Drupal automatically:

Saves content and relates it using self referencing entity reference fields.
Provides views to display related content
Offers filtering and sorting options

This demonstrates Drupal's core strength: transforming complex database relationships into user-friendly, no-code content management solutions that empower publishers to create rich, interconnected content experiences.

Watch this second episode of Drupal WOWs for many powerful techniques of creating a system of related content in Drupal using self referencing entities without writing a single line of code. Note, this type of relation is different from grouping of related articles based on some common taxonomy terms like Sports or Entertainment.