Simon Willison’s Weblog

Content management gems

15th January 2003

Not one, but three gems from James Robertson:

• Looking towards the future of content management looks at the future of the CMS market over the next few years. James predicts that content management will become commoditized, resulting in vendor squeeze in an increasingly competitive market. He also mentions the possibility of the burgeoning CMS industry moving to open standards, but predicts that this could be five years away.
• Putting metadata to work provides some neat suggestions on ways metadata collected by a CMS can be used to help in the management of a website.
• Why every website needs a CMS is a short but sweet introduction to content management for small site owners.

One thing that I think is missing from the metadata article (probably because it is so obvious) is the importance of the availability of a good title for each piece of content. When I started this blog I chose not to use post titles as I wanted entries to stand together on the day they were posted rather than existing as completely unique entities. When I later changed my comments system to avoid popup windows I was forced to make entries available on their own page anyway, with the lack of titles forcing me to title the page with the date of the entry rather than something more explicit. Further more, when I finally get around to implementing a search engine I will probably be forced to return entire entries in the results rather than just a relevant extract thanks to the lack of a title to display on the results page.

As always, Mark Pilgrim provides an excellent example by adding both titles and abstracts (mentioned by James in his metadata article) to hist posts and serving them up with the search results. I don’t think I have the energy to go back over all my old posts and add abstracts but some day I’m going to have to go back and add titles (probably adapting most of them from the permalink almost-titles I have already). But not today. Today I’m revising Lamda Calculus.