Learning objectives
- Understand that content management predates the Web by millennia
- Define "content" by its two essential properties
- Distinguish content from raw data
- Separate the discipline of content management from the software
- Explain the four things a CMS does — and the four important things it doesn't
1Older than the Web
It's tempting to think content management was invented alongside the website. It wasn't. For as long as humans have created content, we've searched for ways to manage it. The Library of Alexandria (roughly 300 BC to 273 AD) was an early content management system: it preserved content as papyrus scrolls and codices and controlled access to them. Librarians were the first content managers.
The Industrial Revolution poured fuel on the fire, and the early twentieth century produced great thinkers who wrestled with organizing information — S. R. Ranganathan, Vannevar Bush, Paul Otlet, Claude Shannon, and Melvil Dewey of Dewey Decimal fame. So the need for content management didn't begin with the World Wide Web. What the Web did was hit fast-forward: suddenly almost anyone could publish almost anything, and content exploded.
Early web publishers edited raw HTML files by hand. An article existed only as a single file in a web server's directory — no versioning, no access control, no backup beyond a copy on someone's laptop. One fat-fingered mistake and it could all "blow away like a dandelion in the wind." The first real step forward for many was a source-control tool that added backups, versioning, and file locking. That wasn't marketed as a CMS, but functionally it was one — content had finally moved from "cash under the mattress" to "an FDIC-insured bank."
2What is "content"?
People use "data," "information," "content," and "knowledge" almost interchangeably. For our purposes, the most useful distinction is between content and raw data. Content has two defining properties.
Property 1 — Created by humans through editorial process
Content is produced through editorial process: the work humans do to prepare information for publication. That includes modeling, authoring, editing, reviewing, approving, versioning, comparing, and controlling. It is deeply subjective. Two editorial teams handed the same facts will produce two different articles, because the process pivots on human judgment:
- What should the content be about?
- Who is the intended audience?
- From what angle should we approach it?
- How long should it be? Does it need supporting media?
A computer won't make these calls. They're messy, subjective, imperfect decisions. As the CM101 material puts it, content "is subjective and open for evaluation and interpretation. It has nuance. It is artisanal." And it's iterative — content is roughed in and refined "like clay on a potter's wheel," often even after publication.
Content is never "right." It's just "right now."
Property 2 — Intended for human consumption via publication
Content is created for a purpose: to be distributed and ultimately consumed by other humans. It might be scooped up by an API and rearranged along the way, but eventually it reaches a person. It is forward-looking — an investment in future communication.
"If you strip away all of the technology and terminology that we use to describe information systems, what do you have left? A simple and utterly commonplace idea: information systems help you talk to people who are not in front of you." — Bob Boiko, Laughing at the CIO
Information produced through editorial process and ultimately intended for human consumption via publication.
That definition also hints at a core split we'll return to all course long: content is first created and managed, and then it is published and delivered. Those are two different disciplines with different skills and mindsets.
3Content vs. data
Contrast our news article with the record of a retail sale. Swiping a credit card involves no editorial process. The resulting data won't be reviewed, approved, or edited (editing it might even be illegal). It's deterministic, not subjective — a backward-looking record of an instant that already passed. It is, by design, "cold, sterile, and inert."
| Content (a news article) | Data (a sales record) | |
|---|---|---|
| Created by | Humans, via editorial process | A machine/transaction |
| Orientation | Forward-looking investment | Backward-looking record |
| Nature | Subjective, nuanced, iterative | Deterministic, exact, fixed |
| Edited after creation? | Frequently | Almost never |
| Consumed by | Humans, repeatedly, into the future | Rarely, usually only in aggregate |
Because these two kinds of information behave so differently, managing them is a fundamentally different job — which is exactly why content needs its own kind of system.
4What is a content management system?
A software package that provides some level of automation for the tasks required to effectively manage content. It is usually server-based, multiuser software that works with content stored in a repository.
Behind the scenes a CMS is many parts — an editing interface, a repository, publishing mechanisms — but to a non-technical editor they all blur into one monolithic thing: "the CMS." A CMS lets editors create new content, edit existing content, run editorial processes on it, and finally make it available for others to consume.
The discipline versus the software
Here's a distinction professionals care about. A "content management system" is a specific piece of software that enables the discipline of content management. Just as a Ford Taurus is one manifestation of "personal transportation," WordPress, Drupal, and Optimizely are manifestations of software enabling content management.
The discipline — the accumulated theories, patterns, and best practices — transcends any single system. It's almost a Platonic ideal, and because it's subjective, there is no Grand Unified Theory of Content Management, only a set of debatable best practices. The good news: skill is partly transferable. Every CMS still has to solve the same transcendent problems — workflow, versioning, publishing — so learning one deepens your grasp of the discipline itself.
5What a CMS does
Why are we better off with a CMS than without one? Four core value propositions:
Controls content
The CMS "knows" where content is, what state it's in, who can touch it, and how it relates to other content. It provides permissions, state management & workflow, versioning, dependency management, and search — all of which reduce risk. The shareholder report won't leak early; the only copy of the procedures manual won't be deleted by accident.
Enables reuse
The same author bio appears under every article that person writes; the privacy statement appears on every page. Content is stored once and retrieved wherever needed, rather than copied by hand. How well you can reuse content depends heavily on how well it's structured.
Automates & assembles
With everything in one place, content can be queried and manipulated: "find all articles from last week mentioning SPECTRE." It can be reformatted (PDF, ebook), turned into navigation and lists, translated, and altered in real time based on visitor behavior. The CMS becomes the single oracle for everything about your content.
Increases editorial efficiency
A good CMS raises "editorial throughput" — more content, higher quality, in less time — with minimal friction. This has an outsized effect on morale, which is intangible but critical. Nothing destroys editorial morale faster than a clunky editing interface.
6What a CMS does not do
Now the bad news — and the source of most disappointed CMS projects. These are things a CMS doesn't do but that people wrongly assume it does.
❌ Create content
A CMS manages content; it doesn't write your articles, policies, or posts. Many launches end with everyone asking "so… now what?" Some clients call years later asking how to log in for the first time, having never changed their site since launch. It also can't guarantee your content is any good.
❌ Create marketing plans
A CMS knows nothing about marketing. Effective marketing blends aesthetics, sociology, psychology, experience, and intuition — a human practice. Software can execute a plan more efficiently, but the plan still has to be conceived and analyzed by competent people.
❌ Format content well for you
Give editors a rich-text toolbar and you'll get too much bold, inconsistent alignment, random hyperlinks, and bad image placement. "Editors have never seen a button they didn't want to press." Often the only fix is removing options — and weathering the complaints.
❌ Provide governance
Governance — who may do what, and through what process — is a human discipline. The CMS only enforces limits you define in advance. It will faithfully carry out whatever your organization tells it to; deciding what that should be is up to people.
A house is a rough combination of three things: raw materials (wood, nails, glass), tools (hammers, saws), and the human power to make it go (Ted, your contractor). None of them builds a house alone. In content terms: the raw materials are your content, the tools are your CMS, and Ted is you. All the content in the world does little unmanaged; all the management in the world does little with no content; and neither does anything without human effort tying them together.
The single most important idea in this course: a CMS is a means to an end, never the end itself. The goal is enabling content to be consumed by the people it's meant for. The software just makes that safer, more reusable, and more efficient — the ideas and effort still have to come from you.
🔑 Key terms from this lesson
- Content
- Information produced through editorial process and ultimately intended for human consumption via publication.
- Editorial process
- The subjective human work of preparing information for an audience: modeling, authoring, editing, reviewing, approving, versioning.
- Data
- Deterministic, machine-produced, backward-looking information that needs no editorial services.
- Content management system (CMS)
- Server-based, multiuser software that automates the tasks of managing content stored in a repository.
- Repository
- The store where a CMS keeps content objects.
- Discipline vs. software
- The transcendent practice of content management vs. any one product that implements it. No single "Grand Unified Theory" exists.
Review Questions
Test your understanding. Click each question to reveal the answer.