When I mentioned the other day that our site management system has more than 30 content types, you might have reacted in one of two ways:
1. Why on earth so many content types?
2. What's a content type?
Let's take the second question first, for clarity's sake.
In a comment yesterday, Ed Kohler raised some questions about timely vs. "stale news" that I thought I'd address by turning back to my theme of basic assumptions and assertions behind our site management system. Timeliness is right at the top of the list.
I've previously mentioned some of the assumptions and assertions behind the site management toolkit we're developing at Morris. One key assumption is that editors should be able to determine page layouts -- something that's just not possible with a lot of template-driven content management systems. Here's how we're making that work.
Editors begin by seeing the site pretty much as everyone else would.
Yesterday I began listing assumptions and assertions that are part of our thinking about our evolving website management system. Here's another: It's everybody's game now.
While we're treading water pending the rollout of our Drupal-based site management project, I thought it might be worth mentioning some of the principles and assumptions behind it. Here's one: No editions, please.
I've seen developers put a great deal of effort into creating Web content managment systems that are intended to reflect the edition structure -- daily, weekly, monthly, whatever -- of a legacy (print) product.
Don't do it. We live in a 24x7 world. The Internet is always on. Information should be available when it makes sense.
This week I'm in Jacksonville, Fla., where a team (right) is hard at work rebuilding Jacksonville.com on our new Drupal-based site management system. There are others up in Augusta and other locations, working as part of a larger virtual team, but even with instant messaging and regular conference calls there's no substitute for shoving a bunch of folks into one room with a sack full of junk food and not letting them out.
Last month I described how we're working to build a next-generation news website management system, based on the Drupal platform. Much of that system has been built out and configured on a development server at work, but there's quite a bit of work remaining.
