Advanced Topics in CMS: Course Syllabus

This is a course taught by Deane Barker for the Masters in Content Strategy program at FH Joanneum in Graz, Austria.

This course is designed as an introduction to multiple topics around content technology. The goal is a broad base of familiarity with the capabilities, limits, and challenges of content technology, with an emphasis on the continuing theme of practical implementation versus theoretical perfect.

This course is targeted to non-developers. Some experience with CMS as a user is helpful, but not required.

The primary goal of the course is

This course is comprised of:

• 9 full lectures, each approximately one hour long
• 4 assignments
• 1 book, totaling approximately 250 pages of reading
• Several dozen additional reading assignments
• 1 large writing assignment, based on the books
• 1 smaller writing assignment, where you will need to connect one of the lecture subjects with your personal or professional experience

Grading

The course is graded as follows:

• You will receive the default grade of “2” if you attend all lectures, complete all reading, and complete all assignments
• If you desire an advanced grade of “1” you will need to contact the instructor for one extra-curricular assignment
• If you do not complete all coursework, you will fail the course

(Note to potentially confused non-Europeans: this is the European grading system of 1-5, not the North American grading system of A-F.)

I do evaluate assignments, and reserve the right to request resubmission, but I do not check attendance for the lectures, nor do I verify that you have completed the reading (aside from competent completion of assignments based on the reading). I assume you are taking the course to learn the material, and therefore I trust you will complete the work.

Books

Designing Connected Content: Plan and Model Digital Products for Today and Tomorrow (“DCC”)

You will read this entire book at your own speed. It needs to be complete by the end of the class.

Purchase from Amazon

Lectures / Lessons

Lesson 1: Rich Text, Formatting, Layout, and LMLs

How to allow and manage rich text amidst more templated information. Why rich text can be a problem. Different ways of managing the drawbacks of rich text. How narrative composition changes rich text and provides new options. How LMLs can be used to control rich text.

• Read: To Structure or Not to Structure
• Read: Markdown: Overview. The “Overview” section, down to the “Block Elements” heading.
• Read: What’s Wrong With Markdown. I don’t endorse the sentiment of this article (nor the tone), but it’s another perspective which is worth knowing about.
• Read: On Semantics and Markup
• Activity: Markdown Formatting

Lesson 2: Full-Text Search

Indexing vs. searching. Parametric vs. full text search. The timing of indexing. Tokenization. Stemming. Lemmatization. Stopwords. Scoring and biasing.

• Read: Tokenizers. Become familiar with the breadth of tokenization options available.
• Review: Default English Stop Words from Different Sources. Just review a few entries in this list to become familiar with common stopwords, and the breadth of different styles of stopwords.
• Read: A Comparative Study of Stemming Algorithms (PDF). Important: you can skip section 5.2 of this document (“ Statistical Methods”)
• Activity: Tokenization, Stemming, and Lemmatizing Reversal

Lesson 3: Localization

Localization vs. internationalization. Challenges with partial site translations. XLIFF and automated translation workflow. Methods of language identification. Language fallback and negotiations

• Read: Localization, Globalization, Internationalization: What’s the Difference?
• Read: Localization and accessibility. This is mainly about subtitling and dubbing audio and video, but it makes some excellent points about the assumptions we make with localization
• Read: Localizing Visuals: There’s A Better Way. This is from a video editing software vendor. It’s a bit promotional, and it gets into some specifics about the software which you can ignore. But pay attention to the guidelines they put around how to localize visuals and the workflow considerations.
• There is no activity for this lecture

Lesson 4: APIs and Extensibility

Products vs. platforms. The scope of extensibility. Event-based programming. Batch processing. Webhooks.

• Read: Architecture and Functionality in Content Management
• Read: Problems, Patterns and Why Every CMS Thinks It Knows What You Need
• Read: Checking the Box: How CMS Feature Support Is Not a Binary Question
• Review: WordPress Plugin API/Action Reference. Scroll to “Post, Page, Attachment, and Category Actions” and review the actions available for code execution in WordPress.
• Activity: Extension Point Identification

Lesson 5: DevOps

Technology stacks: PaaS vs. SaaS, hosting accounts, reliability and uptime, monitoring, performance and load testing, data residency

• Read: Code moves forward. Content moves backward.
• Read: Implement the Design: Roles and DevOps. You only need to read the section under “Roles and DevOps”
• Read: Files are the Currency of Web Development
• Read: Repouring the Foundation: The Perils of Content Modeling on the Fly. A discussion about the virtues of code-first or on-the-fly modeling, which is a current point of debate in the industry.
• Read: Plan for Hosting
• Read: An Unofficial Guide to Whatever-as-a-Service
• Read: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. This has become such a classic test of DevOps maturity, that many companies will include their score when advertising for developer positions.
• There is no activity for this lecture

Lesson 6: Personalization and Multivariate Testing

Rules-based personalization vs. intent-based personalization. Available contextual markers. Usability and indexing issues. A/B testing patterns.

• Read: Responsive Content and the Bottomless Website (PDF). Pro-personalization.
• Read: Content Personalization: A Reality Check. Not very pro-personalization.
• Read: Personalization: A Proposed Process Model
• Activity: Personalization Application

Lesson 7: Media Management

Media modeling. Content association and media scoping. Digital asset management systems. Image renditioning.

• Read: File and Image Handling in Content Management
• Read: Image Abstractions and Implementations in Content Management
• Activity: DAM vs. CMS

Lesson 8: Content Integration

Common scenarios for content integration. Patterns of content integration. Development vs. runtime risk. Common packaged integrations. Real-time vs. batch integration patterns. Velocity and latency concerns.

• Read: What is Content Integration?. This was the blog post where I (attempted to) defined the phrase.
• Read: Using Proxy Content Objects for Non-CMS Content
• Read: The Future Might be Distributed. A short article that’s set-up for the talk.
• Read: The Dawn of the Web Content Delivery System (WCDS). A post from decade ago that was talking about content integration under a different name.
• Watch: The Future Might Be Distributed (50:08).
• There is no activity for this lesson.

Lesson 9: Page Composition

Page object-mapping. Content elements, regions, and zones. The effect of page composition on content modeling. Usability and migration concerns with page composition.

• Read: The Utility of Drag-and-Drop Page Composition in Content Management
• Read: To Structure or Not to Structure
• Read: Composite Pages and Embeddable Content. Note the age on this one. A lot has happened since I wrote it, but it’s an accurate look at the problems we were facing which brought about some of the current functionality.
• Watch: WordPress - Intro to Block / Gutenberg Editor. A 10-minute video showing an example of block editing.
• There is no activity for this lesson.

License

This course was developed by Deane Barker. If you have an interest in re-distributing or re-using this content, please contact me. Note that some supplemental content of this course may be copyrighted by others.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.