Principles of Content Management

Managing the content of a publication is a problem that traditionally has belonged to printed media such as Newspapers and Magazines. A Content Management System (CMS) for a newspaper or news wire organisation is probably the best example of a CMS that we have today, where journalists file their stories by entering them directly into a computer terminal that is connected to a central CMS. An editor can then review and edit the story ready for publication. The layout editor uses basic templates that contain the newspaper's "look and feel" as a format for the stories that are dropped into place. A photo editor in turn adds photographs to the stories with captions.

Separating style and content

A major benefit of the CMS described above is the systems ability to separate the content from the style, or the stories from the "look and feel" of the newspaper. There is no requirement for the journalist to be concerned with the layout of the pages of the newspaper when filing a story beyond basic constraints like the length and editorial content of the story. Conversely, the layout editor can concentrate on the "look and feel" of the paper knowing that the journalists and editors have performed their roles of managing the editorial content of the newspaper.

Thanks to the content management system, the staff of the newspaper can be employed to perform the task that they do best: a journalist and concentrate on creating quality copy for the consumption of the reader, the layout editor can become consumed with the layout, white-space and use of fonts and kerning on the page, and the editors can ensure that the transition of content from creation to publication is smooth and well vetted.

Content Management and the Web

The web as a medium has some valid comparisons with printed media such as newspapers and magazines and some important points of difference. For example, webpages are delivered to readers via a computer system that can differ greatly from user to user. Webpage designers (the equivalent of a layout editor in the example above) do not have the luxury of "strict formatting" that newspapers do, in that the layout of a newspaper that has been set by a layout editor when it goes to press is exactly what the reader will see when they open the paper later that morning.

With web pages, the difference in computer systems from reader to reader means that what a reader sees can vary subtly (or sometimes greatly) from computer to computer and the specifications for web page languages and browsers were written with this in mind. As a result webpages are designed with looser formatting than newspapers and this is good news for web based content management systems.

Because of the "loose formatting" of webpages, a well designed webpage layout is able to cope with great variations in content. This means that if a web designer has done a good job of designing the layout of a webpage, the content of the webpage can be changed with much less intervention from a web designer than a layout editor would be required to do for the strict formatting of a newspaper.

A CMS for websites allows a web designer to "design and forget" a website and hand over the manipulation of content to the people who are best qualified to do so, the editors and contributors to the website.

Traditionally a when a small website needs to have its content updated, the website owner employs a web designer to make the changes. With a CMS for websites, and the Klixo CMS for websites in particular, websites owners, contributors and editors are empowered to have direct control of the editorial content of the website, leaving the web designer to do what they do best: design.