content management

Content management is the process of creating, maintain-ing, and archiving data such as text and images to be used for a project such as a book, magazine, or Web site. Nor-mally such projects involve a number of different people: content creators (such as writers or photographers), edi-tors, reviewers, designers, and so on. A large project will often have many documents in various stages—early drafts, material approved for publication, existing publications in need of revision, older material ready to be archived, and so on.

The purpose of content management is to make sure every piece of a project has its status tracked, including who has worked on it and what has been done (or needs to be done). Because more than one person may want to work on a given piece at the same time, some form of “version control” (as with program code) must be used to either “lock” the material while one person is using it, or to merge their separate work into a new version of the document. Naturally there must also be a way for members of the team to communicate with each other in connection with specific parts of the project, and all members must be kept informed of key developments.

Work Flow

A key measurement of the effectiveness of a content man-agement system (CMS) is how well it facilitates work flow, or the movement of documents through the production pro-cess. Work flow begins with the importing of material such as text documents or multimedia resources into the system. At this time the key users and their roles (such as editor or reviewer) are identified, and the system can then route the material to the next person automatically after each task is completed. Often messages are generated and sent to man-agers to keep them informed of progress or to alert them to problems.

Today Web sites are the most common large informa-tion-related projects, and managing them can be quite challenging. Usually multimedia material is included well beyond that found in printed projects, such as audio, video, animations, and information feeds (see rss). Web sites, unlike most traditional publications, are under constant revision and review.

Once created, material will often be reused or repurposed for different projects. Thus an important part of most con-tent management systems is the repository, which makes the material easily searchable and retrievable for later use. Mate-rial that is less likely to be used but still must be retained (such as for legal reasons) may be stored in a separate archive (see backup and archive systems). Note: The term digital asset management is also sometimes used for such systems.

Software

Content management Systems are usually built upon a framework or programming interface (see application program interface), often using languages such as Java, Perl, Python, or PHP. There are many products to choose from, including free and open-source alternatives.

An interesting alternative for some projects is to use a wiki as a content management system (see wikis and Wikipedia). Especially for textual content, wikis offer the advantage of already having revision tracking built in, and full-scale wikis such as MediaWiki have many additional features or plug-ins to aid in content management.