Open and Closed Content Management

By Deane Barker • • 6 min read •
Author Description

Different CMS allow you to define your content in different ways.

AI Summary

This post explores the concepts of open and closed content management systems, discussing their differences, advantages, and disadvantages. The author highlights how these systems impact accessibility, customization, and user control, ultimately guiding readers in choosing the right approach for their content management needs.

Note

Over the years, this became one of the most frequently referenced posts on this blog. I never did continue using the terms “open” and “closed,” as most systems became “open” by default.

My reason for writing this was that 2003 was the height of the blogging phenomenon (social media wasn’t a thing yet), and blogging systems were “closed,” so the idea of an “open” system seemed very powerful.

I was over at OpenSourceCMS.com today playing around with some content management systems: phpWebSite, Xoops, and PostNuke. They were all quite good, with phpWebSite being the one I enjoyed the most. But I want to articulate something I’ve had I was over at OpenSourceCMS.com today playing around with some content management systems: phpWebSite, Xoops, and PostNuke. They were all quite good, with phpWebSite being the one I enjoyed the most. But I want to articulate something I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while…

“Content management systems” are either open or closed. Either the systems manage “content” as they define it, or they can wrap themselves around any content. There are many of the former, and far too few of the latter.

Movable Type, for instance, is sometimes called a “content management system.” But that’s a stretch. Yes, MT will manage content…so long as “content” is defined as an object with a title, a preview, a body, an excerpt, some keywords, and a category assignment. That’s really it. The system is closed in the sense that it’s built around one type of content – blog postings, or perhaps news – to the exclusion of all others. (I made this same argument in a support forum posting several months back. I called MT “a content management engine tied to a defined format.”)

Let’s say you want to use MT to manage book reviews. You’re okay if you use the title field for the book title, and the preview for a summary, and the body for the review. But where do you put the publisher? The number of pages? The ISBN? There are some plug-ins that allow you to store key/value pairs in MT, but you’re getting into hack territory pretty quickly.

(To be fair, Six Apart has never claimed MT is anything but a blogging system. Users being as demanding as they are, however, have tried to stretch MT into other types of content management and then they complain in the support forums when it won’t work.)

phpWebSite, PostNuke, and Xoops were the same. Yes, they managed content, so long as it fit within proscribed guidelines. For news or announcements, you have a headline and a preview and a body. That is the “content” that it manages. (In fact, these three systems have another limitation in that their display side is fairly derivative – phpWebSite looks alike a portal and everything fits in “blocks,” and the other two are essentially three-column layouts. That’s another post, however.)

An “open” content management system would let the user define the parameters of the content (or “objects”) that it manages. For instance, if you wanted to handle book reviews, you could simply define a new object – a “book” – and the fields you needed:

You could even apply validation rules. “Title” is required. “Year” must be four digits. “Number of Stars” is a select box of whole numbers between 1 and 5. Etc. The CMS would then render a Web-based editor based on the properties you have defined.

Here we have Utopia. This is true “content” management – a system adaptable to whatever content you choose to store in it, whether it be a simple blog system, an employee directory, a database of auto parts, whatever. The system could wrap itself around whatever you wanted.

(How would you store this mess in a database, you ask? You probably wouldn’t – data as volatile and unstructured as objects having arbitrary properties defined on the fly is a textbook case for XML.)

There are systems that do this, but they’re high-end (/tech/blog/images/open-and-closed-content-management/I’ve done this with Documentum and I’ve seen it done with Interwoven). Is there a low-end system that would accomplish this same thing? Perhaps Ektron’s CMS300 (see this screencap), though at $4,999+, many people wouldn’t consider it “low-end.” (And, besides, Ektron’s system is 100% dependent on their ActiveX-based WYSIWYG editor.)

Is there an open-source system that does this? I’ve never seen one. Perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough. I know that you can write modules for PostNuke and such that may let you emulate some of this functionality, but I’ve never tried it.

So, you ask, if I’m full of all these great ideas, why don’t I write this system? Would it surprise you to know that I’ve already started?

Links both to and from this – Open and Closed Content Management Re-visited November 27, 2005
A CMS should be able to solve content-related problems without me having to write code to support it.
Links to this – Varying Levels of Content Structure August 22, 2011
Content structure is achieved at a variety of levels -- structure within a property, structure withing a content object, structure between different content objects, etc.
Links to this – What Makes a Content Management System? June 30, 2007
Comprehensive post discussing the most common features found in content management systems today.
Links to this – The Four Disciplines of Content Management November 24, 2007
All of the disciplines put under the "content management" moniker can actually be split into four distinct groups.
Links to 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 to this – The Problem with Custom Fields December 3, 2005
This is an explanation of why just adding "custom fields" to a blogging platform doesn't necessarily turn it into a CMS.
Links to this – Don't Get Ahead of Yourself March 12, 2005
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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 – On Posting Practices December 27, 2006
Aaron Mentele is asking about posting practices for people who blog a lot. But while the first part of my prediction seems to be true, I can’t say the same about posting getting any easier. Deane Barker tells me he spends 15 minutes on each post with the exception of an occasional chapter on cms...
Links to this – Making Your Fields Do Their Own Dirty Work August 19, 2005
At one point or another, all content management systems (CMS) come down to some kind of datatype. You have to be able to set a field to a string, or an integer, or whatever, and then enforce and manage that piece of data. The idea is that you take these datatypes and glue them together to form...
Links to this – Architecture and Functionality in Content Management November 28, 2006
Some content management features are "out of the box," while some are developed during integration. Which pattern is better than the other, and why?
Links to this – The Envelope Pattern of Content Management August 4, 2005
CMS don't need to have an intimate knowledge of the content they're managing. Rather, they just need to know that they're managing content in general, and leave the specifics to the implementation.
Links to this – Database / XML Hybrid Content Management December 6, 2003
Thoughts on Content Management : This guy and I think alike. In the beginning of the article he touches on the same things I talked about when I compared open and closed content management systems . Then, he runs into the same problem: there are too many types of content, each storing their own...
Links to this – Microsoft Excel as a Simple Content Storage Mechanism July 3, 2003
I was doing something for my church last night when I came face-to-face with ADO’s great support for extracting data from Excel files . So I got to thinking…how about Excel as a content storage system? Let’s face facts, offices love Excel. Go to any office, and I promise you they’re storing...