Why content model?
Last Update: 29th June, 2009
A content model highlights the content types within your business. But why model at all? What problems does modelling attempt to solve? Does it warrant the effort?
Content modelling commences by analysing your business and breaking it up into meaningful chunks of information known as content types. Common content types are press articles, events, products, services, news, etc. Content modelling asks simple questions of those responsible for working with content types. The answers are not so simple. For all possible contents types, content modelling finds the best way to: Describe them. Organise them. Edit them. Validate them. Manage them. Display them. Search for them. And so on. However, what typically happens on a project is that virtually no content modelling occurs, or its done badly but worst still, its just plain wrong. Unfortunately, this is not picked up until the project has completed, at which point its either too late or too costly to fix. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The benefits of modelling
GibbNews is a new online publisher and the project has just kicked off with you appointed as the business lead. Realising that news is core, it didn’t take long to realise that news is a key content type. Let’s take a look at some of the things we can think about before we even think of selecting a CMS or engaging with those technology folks.
Editing News
News: Author, Title, Summary, MainStory, Source, CreateDate, PublishDate, Tags, Related Stories, Podcast
After an initial brain storm, you find that the above content type, news, has the above properties (in italics).
What format should the values supplied by an author be for each property? Is the Summary plain text or should it be RichText so that the author can make use of bold and italics? Can you put images in the MainStory? Should the Podcast be mp3 or wma? Should breaking news be captured down to the day, hour, minute or second?
Validating News
This leads on from editing. We can express some business rules on the submitted information thats prevent authors from publishing invalid stories. Is CreateDate in the past? Is PublishDate more than 2 weeks in the future? Is the Title less that 10 characters long or greater than 80? Should all stories be tagged? What are the valid and/or available tags? Should all stories have related stories?
Displaying News
Just how many ways can the same news item be displayed across GibbNews? Full article. Front page teaser. Rolled up as list within a side panel aggregator. Half page. Quarter Page. In a podcast listing. What properties should be used for each of these different ways of displaying the same news item? Do we have enough properties to cater for all these different views?
Searching News
When searching for news, what can we search on? Author. Title. Summary. MainStory. Source. Tags. Create/Publish Dates. All or some of these? Can we filter and/or drill down on these? Which properties should be used in the search results?
Accessing News
How do you access the individual news items? Should news items be deep linkable with a permalink? What does the URL look like? Should it be ordered by year, year/month, or year/month/day? How do you want the news syndicated? Should we be aggregating news from external sources? If so, how should we access these external news items?
Managing News
What is the life cycle for a news item? Should it be archived? How long do we keep it archived? Does it ever expired? Can you delete a news item? Which properties on a news item can be changed after it’s been created? E.g CreateDate cannot be changed? Can you change PublishDate of a news item that has already been published? Can the Author be changed? Can there be more than one author? Can a news item’s MainStory be edited? If so, do we need a LastModifiedDate and LastModifiedAuthor? Do we want our readers to see past versions of a news item or only the latest version? Does the latest author being the current author? Do we need to keep a track of the original author?
Securing News
When create news for different areas of GibbNews, should the GibbNews Food authors be able to view/edit GibbNews Sport news items? Can all authors archive/delete/modify all news items? Do we need to keep an audit trail for all authors modifications?
Editorial News
What is the editorial process? What are the roles? Author, Reviewer, and Editor? What are the workflows? Can any author publish directly to live? Can only a editor approve publishes to live? Who can unpublish news items?
Summary
It is shocking just how many of these answers are left to developers. These are all business decisions that need to be made around the news. Developers see things like news as content types and invariably fill in gaps in their knowledge, when pressed for time, that result in errors and/or glaring omissions. Content modelling addresses this by placing control firmly back into the hands of the business. And that’s why we need to content model. To get answers to difficult questions about your content early.