Web Content Management

Chapter 9. Output and Publication Management

There’s a funny Far Side cartoon showing a group of people in a karate studio. Through the window, you can see a flying saucer has landed on the street outside and “aliens” made of bricks and boards are walking down the ramp, preparing to terrorize the town.

The caption reads:

The class abruptly stopped practicing. Here was an opportunity to not only employ their skills, but also to save the entire town.

The implication is that the karate students were very skilled at breaking boards and bricks, and never expected they’d have a chance to use these skills to actually do something productive in the real world.

The same goes for our CMS. Now we’re to a point where we have to output some content for a visitor to consume. Up to this point, we’ve basically been practicing. We’ve modeled our content, determined how to aggregate it into groups, and identified the editorial tools necessary to enable our editors to work with it.

The one thing we haven’t done is actually publish it. To provide value, a web content management system has to generate web content at some point. We have to get the abstract notion of content out of our CMS and into a form and location where it does some good.

In other words, it’s time to get out of the studio, break some boards, and save the town.

The Difference Between Content and Presentation

As I’ve said before, there’s a tendency to look at a news article that you’ve modeled using your CMS and delivered into a ...