What is content management?

Small sites don’t usually need content management systems. If a site is managed by a single person, and that person can keep in his or her head a fairly clear idea of the site content at any given time, then that person can act as the web site’s editor and be responsible for the upkeep of the site.

Many web sites start this way, even the sites of large organisations. When the "publisher" of the web site is an organisation, and when more than one person is producing the content, the point at which some sort of content management is needed is reached fairly quickly.

Eventually organisations find that they aren’t just adding scraps of content to their web site. They need to think about the formal publishing of content. They need to think about editorial policy. Where does content come from in the first place? Who decides what can be published on the site? What is the lifecycle of the content? How do individual pieces of content fit into the site as a whole – how do content items fit into site navigation schemes or relate to other content items?

Most of these questions are not about technology or software first and foremost. They are about policy. They are about authors and editors. Without committed, empowered people in these roles, a large content driven site is unlikely to be a success.

The role of a content management system is to provide a framework in which all this activity can take place.

The goal of a CMS is to MANAGE CONTENT, that is:

• Provide a structure to the content so that content contributors have a common understanding and vocabulary about the content on the site, specifically how different types of site content are categorised (e.g., "I'm going to submit a new News Story" rather than "I'm going to upload some content on the site")
• Provide an application framework in which client-specific business rules can work with the content
• Provide an application framework that allows the lifecycle of content to be coordinated – give the site editor(s) an environment that allows content to go through formal workflow processes

Can it save money?

That depends. For a very simple site, probably not. Content Management systems vary in price from free to many millions of pounds. Even for free solutions there will be costs involved in setting up and configuration. However, beyond a certain level of complexity, it is impossible to coordinate a web site’s content without a content management system to bring order and process to the proceedings. So if you are publishing a lot of content it’s not usually a question of whether or not to implement one, it’s about which one to choose.

Sometimes the decision will be whether to build a bespoke CMS (or have someone build one for you), or whether to buy a commercial product. Very large organisations with large resources often build their own bespoke solutions. However, content management systems are usually priced in such a way that it would be impossible to develop comparative functionality for anything like the off-the-shelf cost.

Other benefits of a third party solution:

• Established best practices – many others will have trodden the same path with the same software.
• Technical support – most CMS vendors will be able to sell you a support contract.
• Ability to change providers (agencies) – a popular CMS platform will have many implementers.
• The discipline of working within a pre-canned content management framework allows much more rapid development – you don’t have to worry about basic architectural principles.

Types of content management systems

Content Management is a broad term and it’s hard to get a clear definition of what a content management system is. Some seem to be all about documents, others all about portals. Some make a big thing about presenting an editing interface that gives the appearance of editing the pages of a web site directly, in situ. Others stress the importance of separating the abstract definition of an item of content from its particular visual presentation on a web site (or in print, or on a mobile device). Here are three cases that might be best served by different software solutions:

• Case 1: Document Management on a corporate intranet
  The day-to-day activities of a business can generate a very large number of documents like word-processing files, spreadsheets, technical drawings, departmental memos, etc. This system is used to make the document-based knowledge of the organisation available to its workers. Often those workers will be contributing documents back to the system.
• Case 2: An industry news site
  This site is a well regarded source of information in a particular field. It regularly publishes news stories, details of events, special features and the like. Much of the site is available to the general public. There is a very clear distinction between the hundreds of thousands of people who read the site regularly, and the small editorial team who maintain the site by commissioning new features, writing news stories and generally keeping the wheels turning smoothly.
• Case 3: A community portal
  Although this site has an editor, the distinction between content contributors and users is blurred. The site provides tools that allow logged-in users to post new content. The home page is divided up into chunks, each of which is a little tool like a weather forecast or an opinion poll.

Sometimes an organisation will need to choose a CMS that does all these things and more.

Why do we like Mediasurface?

Mediasurface most naturally supports the type of site in case 2 above. However, it is sufficiently flexible (or rather, offers a sufficiently flexible platform) that it can be used to develop the type of sites mentioned in cases 1 and 3 if necessary.

To implement Mediasurface, you first have to think about the content of your site. You need to come up with a set of content types that categorise the content that can appear on the site. For instance, you might specify a “News Story” content type that has the fields “Headline”, “Abstract”, “Body”, and “Release Date”. You might also specify an “Event” content type, that has the fields “Title”, “Date”, “Time”, “Venue”, “Ticket Price”, “Summary”, and “Full details”. Each content type can have its own workflow and permissions model. When adding content to the repository, content contributors would create (for example) a new News story and provide the necessary fields. Editorial staff could approve the submitted story.

Mediasurface organises the site content in a tree structure. You decide where in the tree your content types can live. Some content types could live anywhere in the tree, others might only be allowed to live in a specific branch.

So far we have a system that can classify content by type and organise it into an arbitrary hierarchical structure. Mediasurface imposes few restrictions on how your content repository works and provides a framework in which you can apply business rules as you see fit. One question that can be useful to ask of a particular CMS is “Could you still imagine a use for your CMS if you didn’t have a web site?” In Mediasurface’s case the answer is definitely “yes”. So far we have nothing that is specifically about web sites. We have categorisation and organisation of content, and we could be using the repository to store business information for print purposes, or any other content-driven application we can think of.

However, Mediasurface provides a powerful web delivery framework for this content. You define a template for each content type. These templates are regular Java Server Pages (JSPs), allowing you to build almost any type of web application you like. Mediasurface provides a library of tags for working with content from the repository – many web sites could be built without the need to write any custom code at all. When needed there is a powerful Java API to allow you to introduce arbitrary functionality.

While other content management systems work in similar ways, we find Mediasurface lets us do what we want without intruding. It is an excellent platform for content-driven web applications.