WhiteShark5
commented
9 years ago Author: Mark Boulton Blog Post 10/19/2012
The difference between Content Management Systems (CMS) and Web Publishing Tools (WPT): “WPT’s capture content with the primary purpose of publishing web pages. As a result, they tend to manage the content in ways focused on delivering it to the web. Plug-ins are often available for distribution to other platforms, but applying tools on top of the native functions to manipulate the content for alternate destinations makes the system inherently unscalable. That is, for each new platform, WPT’s will need a new plug-in to tailor the presentation markup to that platform. CMS’s, on the other hand, store the content cleanly, enabling the presentation layers to worry about how to display the content not on how to transform the markup embedded within it.”
He continues… “True CMS’s are really just content capturing tools that are completely agnostic as to how or where the content will be viewed, whether it is a web page, mobile app, TV or radio display, etc. “ And here’s the thing. To create responsive design experiences, we need to use content management systems – as defined by Jacobson – not web publishing tools. Why? Because web publishing tools publish web pages, not chunks of content with great meta data that are agnostic to how they’re displayed.
Now let’s think about the process of publishing content a minute. A writer may use IA Writer, Notepad or Apple Pages. But most likely, they’ll be using Microsoft Word. They’ll create the content, edit it, save it, re-edit, print it and scribble all over it, get it reviewed, talk about it, throw it away, re-write it. Once they’ve done all of this, they’ll need to publish it – or maybe they’ll just need to put it in the editorial workflow for review. To do that, they generally copy and paste paragraphs into the CMS. They’ll then need to fill in all of these other required fields: some meta data, pick some categories, a 140 character standfirst, a standfirst for the mobile display, upload some images, but damn, they forgot to crop them.
As Karen says, a CMS is not an authoring environment, it’s a management environment. Mostly, it’s a painful environment and the headwind from these tools is increasing, especially as we start to think about breaking out content into chunks, not pages. In doing so, our management of that content – meta data, images, display rules – also grows. So what do we do? In-house development teams developing content management systems need to focus a little more on workflow and a little less on features. Understanding the needs of editorial teams goes a long way. A suggestion might be to start a CMS working group that is comprised of designers, developers, editorial, product and other stakeholders who can guide the system more holistically. Create tools that allow for curation. Content management needs to allow for the ebb and flow of content, not just the creation and publication.
So let’s not think about our pages of content anymore, let’s think about bits of content. Let’s think about stories as collections of resources, meta data and links that never have a beginning, middle and end. Let’s think of our stories as adaptive. And let’s build systems so we can make them that way.
http://www.markboulton.co.uk/journal/adaptive-content-management