Afterword

Content management is simply not a static discipline. We’re constantly rearranging the sails on a ship that is floating on rough seas. We never stop changing and stretching the boundaries of something that is built on a platform – the Internet itself – that never stops changing either.

It can sometimes seem hopeless to try to keep up, and I can assure you that trying to write a book about the topic took this problem to another order of magnitude. I shudder to think how quaint and naïve sections of this book might appear a decade from now.

However, no matter how variable the current industry is, it’s important to note that web content management is a new spin on a set of very old disciplines.

Always remember the four pillars of content management:

• Content modeling
• Content aggregation
• Editorial workflow
• Output management

We have been practicing these disciplines in some form or another for millennia. Scribes in Ancient Egypt still had to structure content, organize content, control the workflow of creating it, and find a way to distribute it.

This industry can often be self-important. There’s a tendency to believe what we’re doing is wholly new and original. But while the superficial constructs of the moment might change, the practice of managing content manifested in these four disciplines is transcendent.

All the rest is merely details.

Next Steps

To continue learning about web content management, I invite you to do two things:

• Visit this book’s glossary. There, I define and relate hundreds of terms used throughout this book and include links to related resources.
• Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to discuss any of the topics in this book further, or if you have any comments or objections about anything you’ve read here.