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Content Management Versus Content Editing.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 3:35 am
by onion2k
Have you ever written a CMS? A content management system. The reason I ask is that for the last 10 years(ish) I've been developing web sites and as yet I don't think I've ever actually written anything that I would consider a management system. Every site I build has an area that the site admin can log into and edit their content, some sites have audit tracking to trace who did what, but none have actual proper management facilities.
What I would expect a management system to include would be, at least:
1. Page specification (A textual description of each page on the site, what content is required, what it does, etc.)
2. Work flow direction (A flow chart of steps required to create the page, eg Write copy->Source images->Design page->Publish)
3. Page expiry and update management (Automated system to notify site admin of updates required eg "Page X is 6 months old, please refresh content.")
Now, the question is .. has anyone ever written a CMS with those sort of features? I've never seen one, nor have I seen one advertised. I've seen hundreds of "Ajax enabled WYSIWYG online content management!!!" things .. but they don't actually help anyone manage the content. That side of things is always left to the user to organise. I think I've spotted a gap in the market.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 3:41 am
by Luke
Actually... I haven't seen anything that would constitute "Content Management" by your terms either.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 3:46 am
by matthijs
Indeed. If my programming skills were a bit better I would jump in that gap.
Almost all CMS systems completely focus on the technological aspects. Like which features a system has. What fancy modules you can add to a site. That's one of the main reasons I find it so hard to find the right solution for (client) projects. For a regular website manager the focus should be on the content. What should be updated? Why? How? Who is responsible for what?
Or maybe real management software exist but we don't know about it. If you visit presentations of CMS systems you only hear about what the system can do. Feature after feature after feature. Guess that sells.
Nobody thinks about who is going to have to do the hard work. Work which should be made as easy as possible to do with the software you describe.
Re: Content Management Versus Content Editing.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 3:56 am
by GM
onion2k wrote:Have you ever written a CMS? A content management system. The reason I ask is that for the last 10 years(ish) I've been developing web sites and as yet I don't think I've ever actually written anything that I would consider a management system. Every site I build has an area that the site admin can log into and edit their content, some sites have audit tracking to trace who did what, but none have actual proper management facilities.
What I would expect a management system to include would be, at least:
1. Page specification (A textual description of each page on the site, what content is required, what it does, etc.)
2. Work flow direction (A flow chart of steps required to create the page, eg Write copy->Source images->Design page->Publish)
3. Page expiry and update management (Automated system to notify site admin of updates required eg "Page X is 6 months old, please refresh content.")
Now, the question is .. has anyone ever written a CMS with those sort of features? I've never seen one, nor have I seen one advertised. I've seen hundreds of "Ajax enabled WYSIWYG online content management!!!" things .. but they don't actually help anyone manage the content. That side of things is always left to the user to organise. I think I've spotted a gap in the market.
I wrote a "Document Library" for our company intranet that did pretty much that.
Each department had their own "Area" that they could update, there was a "site map" that constituted your first point.
The workflow was reasonably simple - each department had an "approver" responsible for approving content for their areas, and if any news was deemed important enough to appear on the front page of the intranet it had to be approved by the HR department. There wasn't a "workflow chart" as such, but there was a "workflow status", which showed the end user were their document was in the workflow cycle.
Page Expiry and Update management was included by forcing the author of a document to give an estimated life-time of the document. Towards the end of this life-time, the author was sent an email that informed him/her that the document was about to expire, and would be deleted (archived, really) if no action was taken.
End result was quite good - we had an intranet where almost everything was relevent, where there was always fresh "front-page" content, and where all the documents were well-managed, up-to-date, and easy to find.
All this was written using the Lotus Domino Platform

Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 4:14 am
by Jenk
vBulletin's 'CMS' is the closest I have seen to your description of a CMS, though all that does is break down the modules into subsections and then let you order them and where they appear etc.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 4:19 am
by onion2k
Jenk wrote:vBulletin's 'CMS' is the closest I have seen to your description of a CMS, though all that does is break down the modules into subsections and then let you order them and where they appear etc.
The admin systems I build let site users change the menus and move everything around on the front end of their websites .. but it's still just controlling the content. They're not really 'managing' it. I'm coming to this from the perspective of a manager telling someone else what needs to be done .. rather than doing it. A content management system should tell you what needs to be done and help you plan it out, a content editing system should let you actually do it. I think.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 6:13 am
by Jenk
To me, that sounds like a first time install script that many systems now come with. "You need to configure this, need to create that" etc.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 7:21 am
by sweatje
Here is the
feature set people pay big $$ for in a proprietary system.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 10:09 am
by Luke
Jenk wrote:To me, that sounds like a first time install script that many systems now come with. "You need to configure this, need to create that" etc.
That isn't what he's talking about. I think he's talking about things more along the lines of:
News page: last time edited was 10 days ago - needs an update
Home page: updated today
Some other page: last time edited was 15 days ago - needs an update
etc.
Posted: Wed Aug 23, 2006 10:29 am
by Jenk
gotcha.
Am I right in thinking there is an Observer pattern to be implemented in there? (if so, this would be my first identification of a 'real world' usuage for it \o/)