Thanks to the skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices, a new generation of designers and CMS developers has found the religion of Structured Content. Once the domain of semantic markup purists and information architects, structured content models are at the heart of most multi-channel and multi-device Web projects. At Lullabot, we often work with media, publishing and enterprise clients. Those businesses produce so much content and manage so many publishing channels that keeping presentation and design-specific markup out of their content is an absolute requirement. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that editors and writers are content with rigid, predictable designs for the material they publish.
To avoid that chaos, some teams go to the opposite extreme. They pile dozens of custom fields onto each content type to capture every possible presentation option, or they give editors a menu of carefully tailored visual templates to choose from for each post. For indexes and landing pages, these teams often build visual layout tools to manage the position and visual style of each post, duplicating familiar page-layout mechanisms.
Both of these extremes can make cross-channel reuse more difficult because they all treat design-dependent information as an integral part of the content. In addition, they often confuse content creators with monstrously complicated input forms, and they force writers and editors to play the role of visual designers. This last point is a big one for fast-moving news organizations: Every minute an editor spends managing presentational tweaks is one they can’t spend on critical stories.
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