The Best Practice With Programming A Cms Website Part 1

By Author: Max Rui
Total Articles: 3
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This article is meant to provide you with a general framework for looking at your online content in order to determine the best content granularity strategy for your business or organization. Therefore, its scope is quite narrow. Complex topics such as personalizing content or monitoring content usage patterns will not be discussed here. If you need some more consultation beyond the scope of this article, feel free to contact the author.

This article doesn't assume familiarity with the conception of content management system and a glossary has been given up front the main body. The reader can search for the related technical terminology to get familiar with the content in this article.
Glossary

Information architecture - The structure for content, including classification and categorization.
Content item - A piece of content in a CMS that is created from a template and assigned to a location.
Template - A template defines the structure of content items by using field names and field types, placed in a certain layout.
Field - As noted above, a field is a component of a template. ...
... Most CMS products have multiple field-types like HTML content, image content and links.
Content hierarchy - Most CMS products organize content into a folder-like hierarchy.
Template architecture - This determines how the content in your content management system is structured and published, defining the composition and relationships between a set of content templates that represent specific content.
Content granularity - A website's smaller components, or content pieces. The more content pieces, the greater the granularity and the more structured the system.
Page content - An item of content that corresponds one-to-one to an actual page on the website. In most CMS products, content items are directly accessible by a URL and have an associated layout/presentation logic.
Non-page content - An item of content that is included in a page, but is not meant to stand on its own.
Three Architectural Approaches to Templates

Below we list the three main approaches:

The first approach is to define your content structures using templates and fields. In this way, the granularity rises or falls as the number of fields in each template increases or decreases.
The second approach is to separate content items into page and non-page content.
The third approach is to rely on the relationship between content items to combine small items into larger, more complex content.

In making decisions about the approach you plan to employ in your CMS build, take a good look at what your users need, how they use and access content and what time and resources you have to complete the job. The success of your implementation depends on thorough research in relation to these factors.

Most mid-market web content management solutions (CMS) can support any of these three approaches, which can be used alone but are more often used in combination. How well the solution performs will be driven in part by you making the right choices in terms of your template architecture.

Field-based Template Architecture

This approach defines content structure by organizing content into fields within the template. It is easiest to compare this approach to an HR form that you would need to fill out to be made part of your car insurance plan.

Leveraging Page and Non-Page Content

Many content items in a CMS installation correspond to an actual web page. Each of these content items is built using a template that has an associated presentation object and can be accessed using a URL. This is called page content. There are, however, content items in a CMS that may not correspond one-to-one with an actual web page. These items normally do not have any presentation objects of their own. This is called non-page content. A major benefit to the non-page content approach is that it allows content to be easily re-used throughout the site.

Relationship-driven Template

In many CMS products, content items are organized into a folder-like structure known as the Content Hierarchy this hierarchy generally reflects the navigation structure of the site. For administrative and development staff, this structure can have an impact on maintenance tasks and the general programmability of the site. For content authors, the content hierarchy impacts usability particularly for content sharing. Content hierarchy is commonly used to combine many items into a single web page using rules defined by the presentation objects.
Author Information
Max Rui is a website developer and IT consultant from Zebra IT Solutions, a professional toronto web design company.
Zebra Solutions has the programming experience and capabilities on staff to develop comprehensive database backend features such as content management systems, ecommerce systems and directory listing websites. In addition we can program to suit your unique needs.