Web Content Management

Chapter 8. Editorial Tools and Workflow

The hosts of the TV show MythBusters did an experiment once where they interleaved the pages of two phone books. In effect, they set two phone books together, then pushed them into each other so that their pages alternated, and every page of one phone book was lying between two pages of the other.¹ The only thing holding the two phone books together was the friction of the pages on one another.

Then they tried to pull the two phone books apart.

They tried pulling with a dozen people, then they dangled a person from one of them, then they lifted a car off the ground, then they tried to use power equipment in the shop, then they tried two cars moving in opposite directions. Nothing could pull the two books apart until they got two World War II–era armored vehicles. The phone books finally came apart under 8,000 lbs of force.

Do not underestimate friction. It can sneak up on you and bring everything to a grinding halt.

Your CMS necessarily introduces some degree of editorial friction. To do their jobs, your editors will have to interact with the CMS, use the tools it offers, and suffer without the tools it doesn’t. The CMS can either enable them to efficiently breeze through their work, or introduce friction through poor usability, needless repetition, error-prone interfaces, and poor conceptual models.

The capabilities of the CMS that editors use to perform the editorial process are collectively known as editorial tools or editorial workflow ...