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Managing content of websites
IMAGINE THAT you are a manager for a publishing company or a newspaper and you are responsible for your company’s website. You now have to write articles and also provide images/multimedia content in video as well as sound file formats.
A job like this usually entails editing and gathering of articles from hundreds of sources, ensuring that the company’s training videos, product information videos and corporate messages are recent and relevant. It also involves writing daily reports and getting feedback from people who regularly visit your website. For this, you will require the help of Content Management System (CMS).
Encyclopaedia Wikipedia def- ines CMS as: “A computer software system for organizing and facilitating collaborative creation of documents and other content. It supports the creation, management, distribution, publication, and discovery of information.”
Though the applicability of CMS is not limited to a certain medium, over time it has proven most effective for websites. In this area it covers the complete lifecycle of the web pages, from providing simple tools for generating the content, to publishing it, and finally to archiving the same.
It also provides the capacity to manage the structure of the site, the appearance of the published pages and the navigation allowed to the users. For example, if you have a Gmail account, have maintained a Blog (especially on Blogspot) or if you have ever typed out a mail message using the ‘Rich Text Editor’ on Hotmail, then you have used CMS.
A CMS can be broken down into the following categories:
Content creation — At the front of a CMS is an easy-to-use authoring environment designed to work like Word. This provides a non-technical way of creating new pages or updating content, without having to learn HTML.
Content management — You can read, you can type, thus you can manage content is the premise behind all CMSs. By using a graphical user interface, authors can simply create texts, insert images and multimedia files, schedule content (and much more) to build and maintain a dynamic website.
Once a page has been created, it is saved into a central repository in the CMS. This stores the whole content of the site, with many other details.
Publishing — Content Manage- ment Systems have powerful publishing engines which allow the appearance and page layout of the site to be applied automatically during publishing. It may also allow the same content to be published at multiple sites.
This functionality allows the website’s look and feel to be changed or even re-launched altogether without the need to touch the existing content. There is no more the need for a copy/paste action, which is usually required with most websites today. You can simply recreate the previously existing content in its new design at the click of a button.
Presentation — CMS can provide a number of features to enhance the quality and effectiveness of the site. For instance, CMS can shape site navigation for you by reading the structure straight out of the content repository. It also makes it easy to support multiple browsers, or users with accessibility issues.
CMS can also be used to make your site interactive through polls, forums, comments and guest books, thereby enhancing its impact.
What CMS allows is for end-users (typically authors) to provide new content in the form of articles. The articles are typically entered as plain text, perhaps with markup tags (/b for bold, or /img for image here) to indicate where other resources (such as pictures) should be placed.
The system then uses pre-existing rules (embedded in its code) to style the article, like changing all fonts to Times New Roman and ensuring that every new paragraph is indented, which gives a consistent look and feel. The system then adds the articles to a larger collection for its publication.
The capabilities of CMS applications do not end there. The system includes some concept of ‘workflow’ for target users, which defines how the new content is to be routed around the system. In this way, the workflow capabilities allow more users to be involved in the management of the site, while maintaining a strict control over the quality, accuracy and consistency of the information.
For all its productivity enhancing capabilities, CMS is very simple. The basic ingredient of CMS is database technology (usually mySql), although it also sometimes includes sophisticated search technology and tiered storage mechanisms that may rotate content into various types of hardware-based storage like CD-ROM, and tape, depending on how often it is accessed.
There are several types of CMSs:
— Web content management systems (WCMS) assist in automating various aspects of web publishing.
— Transactional content management systems (T-CMS) assist in managing e-commerce transactions.
— Integrated content management systems (I-CMS) assist in managing enterprise documents and content.
— Publications management systems (P-CMS) assist in managing the publications’ (manuals, books, help, guidelines, references) content lifecycle.
— Learning management systems (L-CMS) assist in managing the web-based learning content lifecycle.
— Document imaging systems are also generally considered under the family of general content management.
— Enterprise content management systems (E-CMS) vary in their functionality. Some support both the web and publications content lifecycle, while others support the web content lifecycle and either transactional content or customer relationship management content.
The proper definition for an ECM is: “Methods and tools to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content across an enterprise.” The word ‘manage’ is used in the sense of document management, collaboration, business process management, records management, email management, workflow and web content management.
Do you know about the two most popular uses of CMS? They are Wikis and Blogs.
A wiki is the type of website which allows users to add and edit content under constructive collaborative authoring. It is a simplification of the process of creating HTML pages, combined with a system that records each individual change that occurs over time, so that at any time a page can be reverted to any of its previous states.
A wiki enables documents to be written collectively (called co-authoring) in a simple mark-up using a web browser. A defining characteristic of the wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted and most wikis are open to the public without the need to register any user account.
Many edits can be made in real-time, and appear almost instantaneously online. A good example of this type of technology is the Wikipedia
The second most popular usage of CMS is Blogs. A blog is an online publication with posts presented in reverse chronological order, for which an individual or a group generates text, photographs, video or audio files, and/or links generally on a daily basis.
The power of a CMS shows in the attributes that distinguish it from a standard webpage, including:
— New data is entered into a simple form (usually with the title, the category, and the body of the article) and then submitted.
— Automated templates taking care of adding the article to the home page, creating the new full article page (Permalink), and adding the article to the appropriate date- or category-based archives.
— Allowing for easy filtering of content for various presentations — by date, category, author, or other attributes.
— Allowing the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permissions and access are easily managed.
The power of CMS has changed the world by giving the power back to the people. Nowadays, blogs are so powerful that huge corporations are taking an interest in them since these pages can make or break a company’s reputation.
Publishing is more dynamic and reader-focused than ever, but most of all the technology has allowed non-techies to finally have their say. Such is the power of CMS because democracy is here to stay.
The writer <jagdecat@ gmail.com> is a freelance contributor
