With Drupal's custom content types, custom fields, and the addition of the popular Entity Reference module, site builders can whip up complex content models without a line of code. Editing those complex inter-related content types isn't always easy for content creators, though. The "Create a node, save it, then create its parent, then link the two" workflow is frustrating and error-prone. Fortunately, the Inline Entity Form module can help.

Like many of the nifty Drupal tricks these days, Inline Entity Form is a custom field editing widget. On any content type with an Entity Reference field, choose it as the field's editing widget, and the rest is magic. When you create a new piece of content, you'll get the form to create the referenced entity on the same form. It works smoothly with multi-value fields, and can use a simple autocomplete picker to link existing entities if they already exist.

The challenge of creating and populating complex nested content relationships has always been a tricky one in Drupal. Inline Entity Form was created by the Drupal Commerce team to simplify the management of complex product collections, and it solves the problem quite nicely.