Content Management on Web Sites.

© Moisés D. Díaz. www.moisesdaniel.com

1.0 .- Information.

2.0 .- Publishing Flows.

3.0 .- Control Characters.

4.0 .- Content Spaces.

1.0.- Information

One of the main objectives of web sites is to distribute information, to publish it, to put it at the internet users’ disposals who are interested in it.

At many sites, part of this information is generated by persons themselves, I mean, it is written and elaborated by people.

Web site definition:

But, what really is a web site? We can understand it as a web application that manages, in a uniform and centralised way, contents from several sources, that implements some mechanisms to surf the contents, that integrates applications and includes collaboration mechanisms for the whole of the users (community) who use it as a work frame. All this in a web environment.

At the beginning of the internet age, Webmasters were frequently the ones who put all the information onto the web.

As the net has been evolving, it has become a more important element in organisations of every kind (a strategic element in lots of them), and the scheme of the Webmaster-InChargeofContents is becoming useless, or we could better say that it was proved to be not the most suitable mechanism to manage the contents, but why?

It is easy, the volume of data to publish and manage has increased in such a way (we talk about data explosion) that the preceding model became a bottleneck. This was due, not only to the transfer rate of information onto the sites, but also to the high attention required by these data (maintenance).

How can we solve this? Distributing the edition and management of the contents between some people and enabling mechanisms to let them include these contents onto the site by Publishing Flows.

Web sites have been evolving not only because of the volume of data that contain. Step by step, we have passed from models based on static pages to high complex web applications that manage contents in multiple languages, integrate applications for user’s collaboration, provide contents in different formats to different devices, and much more. All these requirements make that all contents managed by the site have to go with a huge quantity of control information to facilitate their correct management. We are going to study this in more detail at Control Characters section.

2.0.- Publishing Flows.

As I have said, nowadays it is very frequent to find contents published on any site that have been written, supervised and published by different people.

In fact, a frequent scheme used on this work is the one used during the called “two steps publishing”, where we can find different users profiles:

· Editors. They are users in charge of writing contents, including not only written sources, but adding images, attached files to download, and so on.

· Publishers or supervisors. It is very frequent before publishing contents on a site, these are supervised by people who have a certain responsibility in the organisation. These people are in charge of supervising the information which is going to be published in order to guarantee it is correct, in content and form, and that it is suitable for the organisation.

This makes us need content management environments. There are some captured screens below, that show the publishing flows management: editing, saving the information edited to continue working afterwards, finishing a document edition and asking for its publication, revising, turning over those contents that weren’t approved, publishing, and so on.

Let’s use an example. In a site using this mechanism, its webmaster is not the person in charge of adding contents, but the editors, whose work is completed with the go-ahead of the Supervisors. These are the ones who publish all the information in order to make it accessible for users.

3.0.- Control Characters.

Using publishing flows management we can notice that for each dynamic element, a piece of news for example, we will need to save some additional information about its state of publication. So, we will need to associate it to external characteristics (I have said external because this information is not part of the content of the element).

In any site of medium complexity, there is a series of external characters that help us manage the contents in an effective way. For example:

· Language of content.

· Expiry date. An easy way to automatically manage the information that runs out of time, I mean, the information that is not valid or interesting for users in a certain date, is assigning to each content an expiry date, in such a way that the site won’t show to users contents with an expiry date previous or equal to the present day. Contents capable of running out can be then “Expired” or “NonExpired”.

· Subjects or domains connected to it. All sites tend to categorize their information, as it is a mechanism that helps them show the more useful information for users. Using as an example Legislation: local, regional, national, european and international.

· And the already above-mentioned State of Publication: “In Edition”, “Edited”, “Approved”, “Refused”, “Unlisted”, and so on.

What is more, these control characters can be applied to any content on a site.

As we have modelled on the above diagram, we can basically differentiate between two types of contents:

- Structured contents. These are those who have a group of well defined fields, and that are managed by using data bases. A piece of news, for example, which will consist of a title, an author, a date, a content, and so on.

- Non structured contents. All information that is difficult to organise into fields, I mean, all information which is difficult to associate to a type. These contents are usually on static pages. For instance: a suggestions page on a site. It will consist of an introductory paragraph where the organisation explains the reasons of having at the disposal of clients this service, usually of a form too, in order to be filled and submitted by users, and of any other means to contact the organisation, such as telephone numbers, e-mails, and so on.

We also have to be sure that not only structured contents have control characters related to them, but non structured contents can have them too. We will analyse this question at the following section.

4.0.- Content Spaces

Web sites managing with lots of resources, in pages and inside data base, is not a very easy work.

Conceptually we get a point where it is necessary fragment this whole, and make it easier to use.

At the data base context, we already have some divers mechanisms to realise this work naturally. The most usual one is having various data base tables and using one of them (or more) for each type of information. However, what can we do with static contents and the relationship between them and the dynamic ones?

The concept we can develop here is the concept of “Content Spaces”, understanding it as: a whole of contents (to simplify, let’s consider only static pages) that share common characteristics as the role they play in the site, their subject, visual configuration, physical location, and so on.

The “Content Spaces” make us easy two things:

· They simplify conceptually the static information management, as we go from having miles of pages to some Content Spaces.

· They let us manage control information for those contents in a easy way, as we don’t have to manage this information for each of the files separately. Doing this way, we have control information related to static contents, so we can introduce them into the dynamic of the logic and process of the site (this is a characteristic that ca be used specially in MVC web architectures).

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Thanks to:

Many of the concepts that have been treated in this article comes from the author’s working experience, then I want to thank the conscious or unconscious collaboration (and invaluable with any doubts) of the team formed by (in order of appearance): Marcos Boza, Vitalino Lázaro, Marcos Velasco, José Juán Corpas, Oscar David Fernández, y Felipe Arancón.