More and more I find that the content model is one of the most important content strategy tools at my disposal. It allows me to represent content in a way that translates the intention, stakeholder needs, and functional requirements from the user experience design into something that can be built by developers implementing a CMS. The content model helps me make sure that the content vision becomes a reality.

It’s important to understand that most CMSs have a bias. They’re often designed around a certain “unit” of content and that’s what they’re optimized to create. For blog applications, the unit is a post.

"Rather than handling the cleansing process on the way out, NPR has created a system that cleans the content on the way in. The goal here is to save the content in the database in a modular AND portable way. That means that each discrete object type is stored separately while ensuring that text content in each object is devoid of markup. I call this system “Markup Addressing” and here is how it works:"

"Notice that within this content there is a link to related content where the link text is “Listen to The Entire Album”. Abstracting away the link itself actually alters the meaning of the text as the text provides no information about the audio asset. There is no indication as to what album or who the artist is. So, as this content gets distributed to platforms (both known and unknown), pulling out the markup actually adversely affects the content."

New tutorial: structured field content –

“With YAML syntax and the new YAML parser it becomes super easy to add more than just one address in one single field:”

“As you can see this will give you a lot more control and structure for your content. It's not limited to addresses…”

"What is different though is the way we have designed the authoring interface.

This isn’t a form that looks like data entry, or a view onto a database. It hasn’t been assembled by some developers putting radio checkboxes where they think they should go, or setting the size of a text area to what suits their monitor. It has been based on watching journalists at work."

"My philosophy during the project has been that the reason that everybody hates the content management system they work with is because it usually involves so much content management, when what journalists on the ground actually need is a content authoring system."

“So a real design challenge for e-books isn’t to design the user experience (which is dependent at the end of the day on the device capabilities anyway, which are pretty much unknown) but rather on designing a system that would allow existing publishers to transition their operations from ramshackle print to All Knowing Digital. We already know much of this: you can take the lessons from blogging CMSs, add in photography handling from places like Photoshelter, combine metadata collection from sources like Google Maps and OpenCalais, and version control from Git, and you’re halfway there. Combine it with process changes, where you require writers to file direct to a system that forces them to add in metadata for example, and you’re closer still. Of course, in two sentences I’ve described a process that really encompasses the whole old-media crisis, but I do think it’s a challenge that can be met.”

“The ebook (or emagazine, or whatever you want to call it) will not simply consist of a monthly edition of a collection of pages, each made of words and pictures – it will more likely be a rolling collection of pages and services. The traditional monthly magazine cycle being more related to distribution rhythms than anything. Indeed, why do we keep to a regular monthly cycle in print anyway? Why not, say, every three weeks in the winter, every five in the summer? I digress, but.”

“2. But for the sake of simplicity we’ll call each logical block of meaning a “story”, whether it is a traditional 4000 word prose piece, a slideshow, a video, a graphic, an interactive something or other, a subject-specific chatbot, or something machine-written, or a combination of all of the above.”

“This means that the author has to hand in copy that is much much more than a flat text file circa 800 words. It needs to be annotated. It needs to be hyperlinked. It needs to have underlying data. It needs all of this and more to allow the art and production departments of each medium to produce the very best representation they can of the story within their own medium, otherwise their medium will come across as half-arsed. Half-arsed is worse than not doing it at all.”

“The problem is that metadata is incredibly fragile. If you don’t capture it when you can, it is lost forever. The date you wrote that piece? The websites you looked at when you were researching it? The music playing during that photoshoot? You didn’t write it down? Ah, then it’s gone.”

“So why do everything you can to keep metadata intact? Because it’s from this information that new products can be automatically created, at a scale and rapidity that would be impossible otherwise. With every piece of metadata that you don’t throw away, you gain a factor more potential ways of slicing through your content and delivering it as a separate product, simply as a result of a database lookup. In the case of Vogue today, say, commissioning an editorial product that simply shows every dress designed by Christian Dior that appears in the archive would involve weeks of intern-work, instantly making it unprofitable or too late. A metadata-complete archive in the future would give you that with a single line of code.”

“Having to learn to write in markup isn’t an imposition, any more than having to learn shorthand or telegraphese. And as with learning any new language, you gain a new soul: writing in markup would allow you to embed code.”

“We have heard, during the endless discussions of the death of journalism over the past few years, of many new forms of reporting just ready to save us: database journalism, ambient data journalism, sensor-driven-city journalism, interactive infographic journalism. At the same time, if it can be measured chances are there’s a feed for it somewhere online. The world is monitored, live, in millions of internet-addressable ways.

But today there’s no method to bring the world of live data to the multi-outlet publishing world. By allowing a journalist to embed live data and logic into a piece, however, you give them this whole new palette.”

“A friendly and powerful open source CMS with an exceptionally strong foundation. With all custom fields, an easy-to-use jQuery-inspired API, and a powerful selector engine, ProcessWire will rise to any task.”

“Understanding which content chunks exist is just the start. Now you need to understand why each one matters to the whole—and how much it matters. This allows us to make decisions about how content is organized, prioritized, and displayed for different screen sizes, contexts, or purposes.”

“That’s the thing about adapting content to varied layouts: each case is different. One-size-fits-all rules about how content should react are unlikely to serve your many content types—which means they won’t serve your users’ needs or your business goals either. And as more devices and technologies emerge, you’ll need to develop new rules and make new compromises as well.”

“With a CMS that’s organized around modular, meaningful chunks of content, you’ll be ready to create rules for how that content should bend and shift—and have the systems in place to actually implement them.”

"DocPad is a language agnostic document management system. This means you write your website as documents, in whatever language you wish, and DocPad will handle the compiling, templates and layouts for you. For static documents it will generate static files, for dynamic documents it'll re-render them on each request. You can utilise DocPad by itself, or use it as a module inside your own custom system. It's pretty cool, and well worth checking out. We love it."

"Content management in the cloud, connecting disparate systems, workflows, content formats and types, is a complex problem — one that is too often beyond software not originally designed to solve it.

To make matters worse, implementing a single CMS that promises to do everything has proven to be a disastrous decision. But the alternative — a network that connects legacy and new systems with a flexible cloud-native architecture — was not a solution the old dogs could deliver."

"WYMeditor is a web-based WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) XHTML editor (not WYSIWYG).

WYMeditor's main concept is to leave details of the document's visual layout, and to concentrate on its structure and meaning, while trying to give the user as much comfort as possible (at least as WYSIWYG editors)."

Your WYSIWYG Editor sucks

"The fundamental issue is that CMS’s are too vertically integrated, much like newspapers. They have tried to solve the whole problem, and therefore have not been flexible enough to adapt to new nuances."

"When the content is separated from the presentation layer, it becomes just one of many possibly input options, alongside and potentially intertwined with government data feeds, externally aggregated content, semantic metadata, geodata, and much more!"

"Until organizations break free of their print foundations, content will continue to be underutilized. When it’s structured for delivery through a specific print mechanism, like a newspaper, you have to extract the content and strip away its original structure before using it elsewhere. The better solution is to structure content only once, but in a way that it can be used anywhere. One way to do that is to set aside all display-related information and base structure solely on the meaning of the content. Semantic content structures allow applications to read, understand, and compare content without a human doing the translation."

"With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems. It requires distribution platforms, API’s and other ways to get the content to where it needs to be. But having an API is not enough. In order for content providers to take full advantage of these new platforms, they will need to, first and foremost, embrace one simple philosophy: COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere)."

"This didn’t come to me as a lightning bolt out of the blue. I learned it the honest way: by researching and reading people who have smart things to say about our editorial processes across print, web, and mobile, content management interfaces, workflows, and APIs, and what that means for the future.

You might want to learn this too, so here’s a roundup of some of the best sources."

"BusinessWeek, however, is just one egregious example of an ugly truth: There’s no such thing as a CMS success story. At least, successes are elusive, which is a problem for anyone in media, as content management systems—the software used by writers, editors, and producers to create digital content for websites—have become as essential as oxygen."

"And agencies often tack new CMS products onto increasingly complex legacy infrastructure, especially for bigger brands. This creates the sort of Frankenstein solutions that can weaken security, force back deadlines, and create headaches for developers."

"The Washington Post is spending $7 million over two years migrating from three separate platforms to Méthode, an EidosMedia-developed CMS popular with daily news organizations. The shift from many to one system altered the way WaPo’s newsroom operates; in a March column, ombudsman Patrick Pexton lamented that the system reduces journalism “into generic ‘content,’ something akin to the unidentifiable filling in a Twinkie.” Managing editor Raju Narisetti maintained that the integration, while rocky at first, has paid off, noting that newsrooms, digitally speaking, “will always be in beta mode.”"

@dvsch Bloop.

*disappears in cloud of smoke*

"Yet the sites we design are often hostile to content. They don’t think about contingencies or how content creates an overall user experience. ...Content is often subservient to related links, SEO content, navigation systems, and more...It’s not just the visual experience that you might not be able to control. If we don’t design to be friendly to content, our users will find a way to make the content friendly anyway. Through tools like Instapaper and Readability, people are time and design shifting to experience your content the way they want. This is the evolution of readers taking control over their reading experience...Instead of making designers react to CMS. Make CMS systems that react to designers."

NISO is where content publishers, libraries, and software developers turn for information industry standards that allow them to work together. Through NISO, all of these communities are able to collaborate on mutually accepted standards — solutions that enhance their operations today and form a foundation for the future.

Edit Flow lets you take control of your editorial workflow right from the WordPress Dashboard. With custom statuses, email notifications, an editorial calendar, and much more you can really master your workflow.

"We’ve finally begun to accept that no single CMS can handle all of a digital news organization’s content functions. A good content management system today is designed to interact with lots of other software. There’s now a genuine expectation that a CMS will play nicely with videos stored on YouTube, or comments managed by Disqus, or live chats embedded from CoverItLive. Other environments such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr come with their own suites of tools. And increasingly, what we call a “content management system” is actually a combo of multiple tightly-integrated systems."

"Using Destry’s idea, you could add different “types” of nodes and say which metadata would be associated with each. So some nodes would have a title and a description and an image, while others might have a description and a region and an ID# etc."

Not shown above are nodes that are not attached to a category. (Nodes that are not used as collections for articles, but more for simple static content)

I have a couple of thoughts as to the interface of this new “Nodes” tab

The Nodes should not be separated by type (e.g. with separate tabs)
The interface should accommodate creating and managing quite a lot of nodes
The interface organize the nodes visually and even make clear when nodes have multiple parents (I realize this is really pushing it)
Another idea would be an option to pull node data and hierarchy from a directory structure of nested folders and files.