Blend Interactive - Thoughts on Content Management and Information Architecture

Gadgetopia.com is the official blog of Blend Interactive. Here, we've been talking about content management for almost five years. Below are some samples of how we think, the depths to which we've examined this space, and conclusions we've drawn from many hard-fought projects.

Included here are topics for Users, Planners, and Managers; for Developers; and Related Technical Topics.

For Users, Planners, and Managers

What Makes a Content Management System?

The uber-post about exactly what a content management system does -- what features and benefits separate content management systems from the average, hacked-up Web site. It's long, but worth reading if you're evaluating systems wondering if you need one.

— June 30, 2007

The Content Tree

The content tree is the most fundamental aspect of many content management systems. Understanding the reasons why is critical to getting the big picture.

— August 18, 2005

The Necessity of Subcontent

When you're evaluating content management in terms of how well it will model your content, this is an important feature to look for.

— May 20, 2007

What Content Management Won't Do

Content management won't fix everything. In fact, if you don't have sufficient editorial controls in place, content management just makes it easier for people to publish bad content.

— October 15, 2006

The First 85%

A lot of projects fail to fulfill expectations because the stakeholders assume that content begins and ends with the system. By our estimate, content management is 85% process. A lot of content management happens before anyone interacts with the system.

— May 25, 2006

A Lack of Basic Text Formatting Skills

Users who can't format a page of text in Microsoft Word aren't going to do much better with a content management system. In the end, a lot of content sinks or swims on what happens in a WYSIWYG editor.

— April 28, 2006

Your CMS Isn't Too Good for Static HTML

Your users scared of giving up FrontPage? They probably have pretty good reasons. There are, however, a few ways you can let them have their cake and eat it too.

— January 20, 2006

Moving from Content Management to Information Management

We often think of "content" as "stuff that gets published on the Web." But enterprise content management is more about managing general information, regardless of where it goes.

— December 7, 2005

The Problem with Custom Fields

"Custom fields" get batted about as the solution for a lot of content modeling issues. However, there's a fundamental problem with them, and they can't fix every problem.

— December 3, 2005

Open and Closed Content Management Re-visited

Open source content management still has a ways to go in readily solving content modeling problems. This is a continuation of the foundational "Open and Closed Content Management" post.

— November 27, 2005

CMS Administation vs. Presentation Languages

Every implemented content management application has two sides: adminnistration and presentation. They don't have to run on the same platform.

— July 17, 2004

Content Management as a Marriage

No system is perfect, and you inadvertantly cause more damage by spending an inordinate amount of time looking for the perfect system. A good solution often means celebrating strengths and mitigating weaknesses.

— July 14, 2003

The Value-Add Side of CMS

There's content management, and then there's content presentation. Presentation is actually pretty simple — it's the management where the real work gets done, and that's what your hard-earned money often goes to pay for.

— July 19, 2003

The Empty House Syndrome

It's hard to imagine exactly where all your furniture is going to go when you're building or buying a house. The same is true of content management -- sometimes you have to move some stuff in before you can see where it's all going to lay out.

— January 6, 2006

For Developers

Functional Design Patterns

All applications, including content management, have patterns -- methods of doing things that transcend languages or platforms. Recognizing and repeating these patterns is key to solving a lot common problems.

— July 6, 2005

File and Image Handling in Content Management

Content objects are often support by one or more files. You need to ensure your CMS isn't going to let users break references by deleting files and leaving their associated content in the lurch.

— June 21, 2007

The Envelope Pattern of Content Management

When managing content, you need to manage the content container separately from the actual content inside it. Doing so makes your system much more exstensible by separating the idea of content in general from the specific content type.

— August 4, 2005

The Site Access Pattern and the Joy of eZ

eZ publish has implemented an architecturally elegant solution for separting the data, settings, and redering templates of their system. This is a disection and discussion of that system.

— August 19, 2005

The "Named Content Views" Pattern

This pattern of content presentation borrows a lot from object-oriented programming. Its power lies in empowering content objects to render themselves according to standard views.

— June 10, 2006

Open and Closed Content Management

A seminal post about how different systems model content -- are they open or closed? The answer to that question determines how well your content management system will enable to to represent your content.

— July 20, 2003

Architecture and Functionality in Content Management

Architecture (grand organization) and functionality (specific features) are different, and one is more important than the other, depending on who you are.

— November 28, 2006

Content Publishing Models

There are three major methods of getting content published to a consumer-accessible URL: Template Pull, Data Push, and Full Stack. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses.

— June 30, 2006

Channeled Interfaces: Hiding the Big Picture

Not all users need to see everything. In fact, a lot of users operate in very controlled "channels," and seeing everything would expose them to more than they need to accomplish their tasks.

— June 24, 2006

Discrete vs. Relational Content Modeling

Content can be modeled in two dimensions: information wholly contained in the content object itself, or information describing how the content is related to other content in the system. The latter is far more diffcult than the former.

— May 31, 2006

Image Abstractions and Implementations in Content Management

To effectively deal with images in content management, you need to separate the image from the file. A "picture of a sailboat" and a "400-pixel JPG at 80% quality" are not the same thing.

— January 30, 2006

Middle Ground: Content Management using Static HTML

If you have a group of users in love with their client-side editors, there are some ways to meet in the middle between content management and static HTML.

— November 23, 2005

Making Your Fields Do Their Own Dirty Work

At its core, content is fundamentally a collection of datatypes. At a certain level of complexity, it pays to "teach" these datatypes how to manage themselves.

— August 19, 2005

The Quandary of the Single Table Web Site

Sometimes sites are so simple they're difficult. What's right for bigger sites becomes overkill for smaller ones. The comments on this post form a great discussion of this topic.

— December 15, 2005