Content Management Primer
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What exactly is content management?
Well, content management is a discipline that encompasses managing dynamic content, usually on a web site. It usually involves the following pieces:
- A content management system, usually some kind of interface that allows content editors to manipulate and manage flat files and/or database tables.
- A content display system that takes content out of a file hierarchy and/or database tables and displays them for site visitors.
The bottom line: a content management system (CMS) allows you to separate design from content from functionality. In other words, if you use a CMS, then you’ll be able to update any content on your website whenever you want, and it won’t affect the design elements on the page or any functionality you might have installed (such as shopping carts or search engines).
Updating your content turns into an easy exercise of logging on to a website and filling in some forms, or using a tool like Macromedia Dreamweaver to fill in a template. Either way, you end up saving hundreds or thousands of dollars because you’ll never have to hire an outside (expensive) graphic designer to do this work for you.
Build or Buy?
At some point, if you want any of these features, you will be faced with a simple decision: spend the money to build this system, or spend the money to buy a packaged software application?
There are a few hundred open source and proprietary tools available to create a content management system, and they each have their good and bad sides to them.
The best way to cut through all the chaff and marketing hype is to consider your needs. Period.
For example, if you need to secure all content displays behind a robust security system, then the tool you implement better allow you to do that. If you need to display both HTML and multimedia files fast, then your content management tool better do that.
Although I’ve worked for various content management vendors (both as full-time employee and contractor), it’s pretty hard for me to swallow any single company’s solution as THE solution.
That’s because each department or company that publishes content has different needs. They’ll each want to track different metadata for each piece of content (i.e., some may care about author’s name and email, some may care about that as well as category keywords, and some may only care about the date it’s supposed to go live).
Some departments will have existing robust content creation processes and won’t mind manhandling content. Others will want the last word in automated workflow and signoff. These are the kind of people who want to leave the office on Friday and know that a press release will go live when it’s supposed to–at 12:01 a.m. on Sunday–without further intervention. (I don’t blame them.)
Some groups will have no archiving needs, and others will have special needs that defy even the best archiving experts.
Some groups will be dealing with the publication of one content type (such as a press release) and others will have to wrangle dozens of content types (articles, white papers, case studies) in all different kinds of file formats.
Some groups will be publishing to just one site in one language, and others will be publishing documents to dozens of sites in 3, 4, or more languages.
Some groups will create all their content in-house, and some will be dealing with freelancers (who need remote access to the system), and with partners and affiliates who create content that still need approval before posting.
Some groups will publish information occassionally, and others will have continuous need for a system that can handle huge daily workloads–and there are groups that live at all points between these two extremes.
After about five years in this business, working on all kinds of tools that publish content onto a web site (including XML, flat-file pushers/pullers, and databases), I now know what constitutes the perfect solution for a client.
Ready? It’s the one that they want. And specifically, one that will save them time, money, and frustration. And gets them away from that place where they have to hire $100/hour designers to update copy and assets placed on their site.
The Minimum Requirements
Generally speaking, a content management system (whether built from scratch or purchased “off the shelf”) should adhere to the following basic requirements list:
- Some kind of facility that allows you to create and edit content.
- A workflow mechanism that allows signoff of all created content.
- A security system that is based on roles (editor, writer, illustrator, etc.).
- Some kind of categorization schema for this content.
- A system for scheduling the launch of content.
- The whole application has to keep up with your staff and with the visitors to the site.
I’ll go into more detail on each below:
Content Creation (and Management)
The soul of any content management system is the set of screens that allows you (or your content staff) to create, edit, delete and otherwise manage your content. This part of the application is usually a group of forms that allow you to add content to a database or file system, and to pull that information up and change it.
As with anything in the content management world, you can add as much complexity as you want. For example, you could have a part of the application that allows you to upload images, and then another part that associates these images with articles, which you manage in another part of the application.
Workflow
Although you could have a series of forms that allow any user to publish content on your site, this isn’t a very good idea. Think about the damage that a disgruntled employee could do to your site if they could press a button and publish changes.
What you need is a workflow system. Workflow in a content management sense is a process for how work is assigned, created, and approved. Let’s look at a manual workflow example, one that probably occurs in your company right now:
- Someone in Department ABC creates a document (a sales sheet) and saves it. After working on this draft for several days, they finally decide to….
- Email it to someone they know who will give them feedback on the draft.
- This person looks at the file, maybe performs some light editing, and sends the document back with feedback inserted.
- The original author goes back to work, incorporating this feedback. They may send it back to the feedback-giver, or they may send it out to a larger audience.
- At some point, the author needs to pass it through the editorial department. So the author emails it to an editor in the editorial department for final review.
- The editor receives the file and places it in his/her inbox. Eventually, he/she opens the file and performs various edits. This is not just a spell check, but a check to see if the document conforms to corporate marketing guidelines.
- At some point, the editor sends a note to the author that the document has passed muster, and that the document has been passed to a production person.
- The production person will do the actual work of converting the document to PDF and HTML and get it ready for site posting. They may also be the person who will update the web site.
You get the idea. Even a relatively simple workflow, as manual as it is, can involve many steps. Even if the editor and production person are the same person in the above example, each person is a different role–it’s these roles that become important in a workflow. (Also, in security.)
A good content management system has to address workflow on some level, even if all it does is implement a rigid checklist. The best kind of workflow isn’t a checklist, though, its a flexible device that allows someone to kick off a piece of work, someone else to approve it, and someone else to publish it.
Here’s an example: let’s say that you are the owner of a company, and you need a sales sheet posted on the website by the end of the week. You decide to use your brand new content management system to order one up. After logging in, you assign a work ticket to one of the marketing writers to create a sales sheet. Then you assign the job of reviewing whatever is written to the sales manager. You want to approve the final product before it gets published. Finally, you assign the webmaster the job of taking the final product and publishing it to the site.
The marketing writer gets an email telling him that he has been assigned a new job. He clicks a link in the email and gets taken to a work ticket details page. He prints out the information and gets to work. He may do some offline outlining and drafting, but eventually he creates a new record in the database and enters his information. When he is ready for review, he changes the status to “ready for review.”
When the system detects that the document is “ready for review,” it looks up the document’s original work ticket and sees that the review and approval job goes to the sales manager. The sales manager gets an email, and he follows the link to the ticket. After she reads and understands what is expected of her, she clicks another link to edit the database record. She can edit, make changes, and ask questions. When she is done, she sets the status to “review complete.”
This sends an email back to the original author, who follows the link to the record. There the author can make sure everything is right, and make last minute editorial changes. When he’s satisfied, he sets the status to “ready for approval.” At that point, you get an email. You see a read-only version of the database record which you can approve–or not. If you approve the document, it goes to the webmaster, who will publish it. If you don’t approve it, you can add a little note explaining why, and the document can make its way back to the marketing writer.
Although this sounds extremely complicated, having a solid workflow system in place will save you lots of pain and embarrassment later.
Who goes there? Roles-based Security
Simply put, you want to make sure that certain people can do certain things, and no more. If you have an author role, you want to make sure that they can’t approve content. Editors should only be able to work on files or database records created by someone else. Publishers should only be able to convert the files to PDF or HTML.
Putting limitations on the different roles is smart business practice–but it can lead you into trouble if you don’t have some way to override the system. For example, you don’t want publication of a press release to get backed up because the only editor is out sick. You should be able to create a new editor, assign them to the task, and keep the document moving through the workflow.
Categorization is the Thing
A pile of content in your content management system does no one any good. You have to break that content out into categories–this makes it easier to manage (for you) and easier to find (for visitors).
A categorization schema can be a simple list of terms you can apply to each article, or it can be a list of sections that you put content into (such as content categories in a knowledge base). This list can be a flat list of terms, or it can be an arbitrarily complex hierarchy of terms.
Using a list like this can drive personalization (see the article on Personalization and Information Design on this site) and can also drive more accurate search engine results. It can also have the added benefit of allowing automation of cross-linking.
For example, let’s say that for any given article you publish on your site, you want to show five related articles on the site. You don’t want to do this manually, you want the system to figure it out by doing a lookup on the published article’s category and doing the rest by itself. In most cases, this is a fairly simple operation: take the category of the article you’re showing, then look up and extract the names of five other articles in that same category and provide links to them.
As simple as this sounds, this very handy feature would be next to impossible without a category list. Why? Because the list provides a centralized framework–a skeleton, if you will–that allows you to organize the site. It’s not arbitrary, wishy-washy, or guessing–it’s the law, at least for your content.
This topic can fill (and has filled) books, so I can’t do it justice in this little article.
3, 2, 1 … Launch!
One of the most important aspects of a content management system is the ability to launch content at scheduled times. Anyone can create a content management system that publishes a file when you hit the “Go live” button. The real art is in figuring out the requirements for a scheduled launch.
For example, you may want to publish an article on a certain date, or at a certain time on a certain date. The difference between these two requirements are worlds apart in functionality, so the system you build (or buy) better be able to handle either or both.
Here’s another scenario: You want to publish a document only after another document has been published. This adds another layer of complexity–being able to watch and report back on the status of other files or database records.
Let’s make it even more interesting: You want to publish a document only after another document has been published, but by a certain date, regardless of the other document’s disposition. Now we’ve introduced a fairly complex causal relationship.
Keeping up with You
Finally, the last basic need should be scalability. Put plainly, the content management system needs to keep up with you and your site visitors. A content management system that bogs down if you have a bunch of staff working on it is no good. Neither is a content management system that can’t keep up with your visitors.
How will you know that the system you are buying or building will keep up? You can’t predict entirely, but generally speaking, you need to consider:
- How the data is structured in the database
- What chokepoints exist in the application (in other words, at what point does the tool require the most resources–usually this is during adding/updating content, or when associating content with categories)
- The performance of the hardware on which the CMS lives
- The network link between your business and the CMS machine
You might have a beautifully designed database, an application that doesn’t bog users down, and a very fast machine to host it on….but if you are connecting 10 staff members to it through one dialup, you’re going to have problems.
Conclusion
With any luck, this primer has given you the “lay of the land” when it comes to content management systems. If you have any questions, feel free to email us at info@tripledogdaremedia.com–we’d be happy to chat!
Some Resources
Your Clients Need a Content Management System, a funny and refreshing read.
CMS-List, devoted to all things content management.
A simple content management system–but don’t let the title fool ya.
Untangling Web Content Management.
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