The Four Disciplines of Content Management

By Deane Barker • • 3 min read •
Author Description

All of the disciplines put under the “content management” moniker can actually be split into four distinct groups.

AI Summary

This post explores four essential disciplines of content management: strategy, governance, operations, and performance. The author emphasizes the importance of integrating these areas to enhance content effectiveness, streamline processes, and ensure consistent user experiences across digital platforms.

A lot of stuff gets lumped under the heading “content management.” In my experience, however, all the technical activities under the banner of content management can general be broken out into four disciplines.

  1. Content Modeling: This is the concept of getting your content to “fit” into a structured content management system. It’s the process of defining the content types, their attributes, and their relationships to other content.

    This normally a background, development-type activity. Your average content creator will not be involved in it, and – unlike the other items in this list – it’s a one-time, non-iterative type thing. However, it’s critical and it will affect everything after it.

    (See also: Open vs. Closed Content Management, The Content Tree, Discrete vs. Relational Content Modeling)

  2. Content Creation and Editing: This is the process of actually creating new content – the interfaces and procedures users invoke to make something out of nothing, or to change content already in existence. It naturally subsumes some of the content modeling (how content is modeled will affect how it’s created), but also encompasses things like the quality and capabilities of the WYSIWYG editor and the usability of actually getting a content item into edit mode.

    (See also: A Lack of Basic Text Formatting Skills)

  3. Content Management: This is the everything that happens with a piece of content after its created and until it dies. This includes the permissions, workflows, versioning, check in/out, task management, reporting, archiving, administrative searching, language translation, and any other action involved in keeping this content relevant, current, effective, and general under control.

    This is the real “management” part of content management. This is the stage in which content will live for 99% of its life. Yes, modeling, creating, and publishing it is very exciting, but those are all “point” activities – they generally occur at a single moment in time. At all other times, content falls under the banner of “management.”

    (See also: The Value-Add Side of CMS)

  4. Content Publishing: This is the process by which a piece of content goes from somewhere in your repository to a URL where it can be consumed by an end user. This includes the templating system that generates the HTML (or any other renditions), and the process by which the content is made available at another URL, whether that be as simple as changing one field in a database, or as complex as generating a file and transporting it somewhere.

    (See also: Content Publishing Models, The Site Access Pattern and the Joy of eZ)

Note that these are technical items only. This doesn’t include the basic concept of conceiving, writing, and editing the actual content.

(See also: What Content Management Won’t Do)

To make a really effective content management system, each one of these pieces has to be well-done. Too many times, I see a system do really well at one, and fall down on another.

These are the four central disciplines of content management. Screw one of them up at your own peril.

Links to this – To Structure or Not to Structure December 7, 2007
The decision of when to structure content or not can be subjective. This is an example of one such situation, and the pros and cons of the various methods.
Links to this – Chasing the Ideal: Relational Content Modeling in Content Management April 11, 2011
Every CMS tries, in some extent, to duplicate the classic model of the relational database. Some come closer than others to this "ideal."
Links to this – Words, Links, and Centrality: Evaluating 17 Years of Gadgetopia Content April 1, 2019
What do you do when you have too much content to review?
Links from this – Open and Closed Content Management June 20, 2003
Different CMS allow you to define your content in different ways.
Links from this – The Content Tree August 18, 2005
A while back , I mentioned the concept of a “content tree” in regards to content management. I cited this as a “functional pattern” and promised to talk about it more, but I never did. So, here goes – With every content management system (CMS) I’ve written, I always get back to the concept of a...
Links from this – Discrete vs. Relational Content Modeling May 31, 2006
Content modeling "inside" a single content object is generally quite simple. What's trickier is content modeling between multiple content objects.
Links from this – A Lack of Basic Text Formatting Skills April 28, 2006
Most content creators have a lack of basic formatting skills, making it difficult to have them create well-rendered content.
Links from this – The Value-Add Side of CMS June 19, 2003
Managing content is hard. Templating it is not. Which side of the equation is delivering the value?
Links from this – Content Publishing Models June 30, 2006
Different content management systems publish content in different ways. This is a discussion of the three major patterns.
Links from this – The Site Access Pattern and the Joy of eZ August 19, 2005
A case study example on the seperation of content and presentation channels.
Links from this – What Content Management Won't Do October 15, 2006
Content management can do a lot, but there's a lot that it won't do, and you need to understand this before you implement. This is a reality check on the problems content management is not going to solve for you.