 add an existing field share a field across content types using a field across several content type can be handy if a piece of data is relevant for several content types a typical use case is a phone number field used in both restaurant and hotel content types even if hotels and restaurants are different enough to deserve their own specific set of fields and thus their own dedicated content types when a field has been added to more than one content type we also say it is shared and that it as several instances at the bottom of the manage fields page for a content type you ll find this in order to add a new instance of an existing field to a content type you need to provide the following information  label  a humanreadable name for the field it will be used in input forms and on displayed content all characters are allowed including spaces accentuated or noneuropean characters field  the field to be shared a field cannot appear more than once in each content type thus only fields that are not already present in the current content type will be proposed as shareable if none the add existing field option is not available on the manage fields page for this content type selecting a field automatically populates the label and widget values with the ones used by the previous field instance but you can change them if needed before submitting the form widget  the form element that will be used to input data for this field on content forms text input select list etc each field type has its own list of available widgets when selecting a field to share the list of widgets you can select is automatically updated  