CMS of the future

End the outdated approach to content

Throughout the history of the Internet, we worked with content in two ways:

Created "one template for all occasions"
Created for each case a unique pattern.

As soon as we were faced with the fact that we could not organize content using the basic text field and the WYSIWYG editor associated with it, we immediately made a separate template with our own fields and logic.

At a time when most of the content was a simple column of text with images inserted here and there, the idea that a particular type of content might require its own unique template with its own CSS seemed too complicated. We created content insofar as. But over time we have accumulated a lot of very different types of content. For each type, it is given what information it contains and in what manner it represents it.

For example, the publication of the blog. In this form it is customary to publish articles, documents, studies. For the publication of the blog characteristic attributes are such as: title, author, publication date, abstract, text, pictures, comments, etc., as well as a special visual way of presenting these attributes. As a rule, it is the visualization of characteristic attributes that most clearly distinguishes one type of content from another.

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In fact, there is no problem in multiplying content types. Each type satisfies a specific need, and it does not arise without a special need. The problem is in the presentation formats of these types. “One pattern for all occasions” is not suitable for the whole variety of types. Therefore, we create unique templates for each. Those. problem in inflating templates. The more templates, the more rules we need to take into account in the CMS, the more time to spend on working out these rules and their support. In the end, we have to make so many decisions before most of the content is created, that over time we feel the limitations of our unique created templates and really want to change them. Inflating templates is inefficient, costly and, most importantly, it depresses us.

But there is a solution. Six months ago it existed only in the form of sketches in my laptop. And now, this is the root of our CMS. Many of our customers already use this and they like it. I'll show you how it works. I am sure that after that you will not be able to think about the content differently. But first, I want to delve a little into the problem of patterns and design, which will take some time. If you are in a hurry, you can go directly to the section “We need a modular approach to content.” But promise that a little later you will come back and read everything entirely, agreed?

Content management or page management?

Content management and page management are two completely different things. Using CMS, most of the time we, unfortunately, fill in the contents of the form, which depend on each specific page. We give the page what it needs. Being engaged in the creation of a CMS for a long time, I suddenly realized how real is the frustration that users constantly tell me about.

Most content management systems are designed primarily for developers, rather than for content creators. CMS industry is completely divorced from how people create and edit content. ( Mark Boulton )

How we think about the architecture of content management systems inevitably affects how we think about content formatting. CMS tend to organize content analytically: decompose it into types, each with its own set of fields, its own structure and logic. While we are thinking of stories in which the content structure is human, simple and derives from the desire to speak out and express ourselves.

There is an obvious discrepancy. Planning the information architecture of the site - which itself is already a complex analytical process - we focus on the existing CMS capabilities and coordinate our planning with them. This is where our typing whole thinking comes from. Technology begins to predetermine and enslave our creative process, while it should support what this process produces.

For example, I use WordPress for my personal site. In a matter of minutes, I can create a complete site structure to set everything up the way I want. But at the same time I am very limited in what I can do with the content that will be on the site. For WordPress developers, everything is very cool: the number of variables is small, the reliability is high. In the end, it's good for me. I don’t really need anything other than “one template for all occasions.” But this is far from what my clients need. They need something more. Like you too, I dare to suggest.

Let's imagine that we are equipping a new apartment. After we have equipped the bedroom, living room, bathroom and kitchen, we have only one spare room. We can use it as a guest or children's room, as an office or as a warehouse, as we want. It seems that the presence of such a spare room is tempting. But what if we have the opportunity to choose furniture for this room only once? I do not know about you, but I would refrain from buying any furniture at all, until I have a clear idea how I will use this room.

It is foolish to have "one template for all occasions . " When we do not know what we need, we act in the most natural way: we do not plan anything. When we do not have a clear task for what the room is intended for, it can become anything. Most designers will be unhappy with this state of affairs.

Now imagine that we can have as many rooms in an apartment as we want. We can have a guest room, and a nursery, and an office, and a warehouse, and a musical, and sports one, whatever. It also sounds tempting. If you do not take into account that we will rather quickly end all of this, it will simply become impossible to contain all this strange and huge diversity.

This lunatic asylum illustrates the fanning pattern approach. It sounds ridiculous, but such a huge, sprawling and strange apartment does not look absurd at many site planning meetings. On the contrary, all these things seem correct and even demonstrate our professionalism.

I took an inventory of all the prototypes that I designed over the last year, and found that I usually get 15-20 prototypes per project. This does not include any pop-up windows, warnings or purchase steps in the online store. I am talking only about unique templates that involve unique forms of content input and display this content in all possible combinations. Each of these templates requires its own separate layout, i.e. we are talking about 15-20 files that the designer must create and approve with the customer. (These templates also do not include alternative versions of mobile designs). Personally, observing how complicated the production design process is becoming longer and more expensive, I can say that 15-20 templates are too much.

It is necessary to cut off the superfluous, and what is called a modular approach to content will help us in this. Very soon I will get to this.

A modular approach to content eliminates the creation of many unique and complex templates.

Why designing unique templates for each type of content is wasteful, why we should stop doing this:

Content creators have to think about the layout too soon. Thinking about how the content will look is unproductive until you are completely sure that it will be for the content, why you need it, to whom it is intended, and also until there is clarity on a number of other pragmatic questions: who creates content, how often he does it.
The load on designers increases significantly. In addition to creating many unique templates, each of them requires feedback and an approval process. All this greatly complicates the process of making final design decisions.
Content management is a very difficult task. CMS focused on the analytical organization of content by type. This means that as the number of types of content grows, the ways of communication between these types become more and more complicated and labor-intensive. (For example: create a new page - save; create a slideshow - save; create a picture - save; add a picture to the slideshow - save; add a slideshow to the page - save; etc.)
Support is too expensive in the long run. The probability that you will want to change the layout, or even just some small detail in it - after you have long gotten used to working with content in this layout - is almost zero. Moreover, with 15–20 different templates, the developers' costs of making this change may be far beyond what you expected to pay.

But what about ...?

Yes, yes, I know. There are many examples that explode the brain and have nothing to do with stupid content management. This is something completely different. Something new. Something almost like web magic. You are absolutely right. There is another way. Exclusive, custom, made to order.

Let's take a closer look at what it is. This refers to something like this from Globalpost, or such from Pitchfork, or such a masterpiece from the New York Times. The last example of Snow Fall made so much noise that the creation of pages like this was called "snowfalling". These pages are filled with exquisite beauty, they incorporate the very best of what we used to receive from print publications and modern interactive web design. They are like works of art. But they are a real curse for the designer. Why?

The reasons why this snowfalling serves as a bad example of web design:

It is distracting . Pages similar to what we see in the New York Times or Pitchfork is a design that does not focus our attention, but serves our entertainment. How do you think, how many people, attracted by the beauty of Snow Fall, really read all the text on this page? It is quite clear that there is a big difference between the number of visitors and the number of those who learned the information. I very much doubt that those 3.5 million people read something. Do people need all these brilliant HTML5 effects? I think not.
It is expensive. It is reported that it took 6 months to create Snow Fall and a team of 16 people . Was it worth it? Most likely not . But that's not the point. The New York Times can afford to do whatever they want. But who among us has the same amount of resources? Who and we can create content for so long?
This is custom, made to order. This cannot be done using a CMS! These pages are the result of the hard work of writers, designers and developers who have been sitting next to each other for a long time and creating something entertaining. It doesn't matter if it's about a single page or a series. This is an exclusive product in which structure and content are inseparable. Even if you copy one of these pages in order to reuse to present some other data, you will have to do almost everything, according to the new content that you put in. After all, everything will change: the relationship of text and pictures, the location of interactive elements, the whole layout as a whole. In other words, this is not a template. This is his complete opposite.

I asked John Lax from Teehan + Lax , who create a design similar to the one I mentioned above about how much resources they need. And John replied that we need a team of about 4 people (2 designers, 1 developer and 1 manager) and about 2 weeks to create this.

I don't know what your own hourly rate is, but let's admit that creating pages like the ones that Teehan + Lax guys are doing is expensive. If Snow Fall inspires you, that's fine. If you are inspired by Teehan + Lax, even better. But be aware: you will never create a product of this caliber without an appropriate investment. And you will never find a CMS, which itself makes similar magic.

Reconciliation with CMS

CMS use templates for a good reason. They act in such a way that you can use such a simple tool as “add this” or “add something”, where it is already determined in advance what “this” is and what “this” is. Thus, adding “this” or “order” is very similar to filling out a form. It is also assumed that you do it regularly, and that every time, therefore, you need to know what to expect.

CMS tools are like a library. Each publication, in fact, is filling in blank forms. Here is the title, here is the summary, here is the content, here are the pictures, here is the video. After you fill out these forms, the CMS puts it all where you expected it to be. If you add a video, it will be placed on the left or right side of the page, and the text will flow around it, because you have instructed the system to do just that. If you add a picture, it will either fill the entire column in width, or align it to the left or right, as you indicated.

These rules and expectations make templates a template. Good or bad, templates are the currency of the CMS. They allow you to produce content even to those who are not aware of anything in design, or those who do not have time to bother with Photoshop and code.

Unfortunately, I have met few designers who understand all these things — the fundamental limitations of the patterns and the exclusive nature of snowfalling — and who would not be upset that they have to reconcile their creativity with CMS. How often I myself became discouraged by comparing my current design possibilities with those that show me snowfalling.

We always want what is immediately before our eyes. But this does not give us the right not to attach any importance to how it works or how it was done. The task of each designer is to first seriously and responsibly think about how content will be created, with the help of which CMS will be managed and how it will be supported in the long term. It’s just irresponsible to design the site without seriously thinking about the content management system. That is why so many designers and developers feel, after all, that snowfalling is not very correct.

Some might think right now: “What about Medium ?” Medium content is beautiful. It allows you to create stunning pages like Snow Fall, with simplicity that is hard to imagine. How do they do it? Does this mean that everything I said earlier is not true? In short, no, does not mean. And that's why. Here is the page I created in Medium in 5 minutes. To see it, you need to log in. For those who find this tedious, here is a screenshot.

Looks cool, right? Looks like my own fancy version of Snow Fall, right? Not really.

Medium is a content management system with one single template. Yes, you can place text and images in a variety of fancy combinations on one page. But at the same time, Medium does not allow producing content similar to Snow Fall because:
- This is a CMS, and we remember that there is no CMS behind the creation of Snow Fall
- This is a special blogger platform: everything that you put into Medium remains here forever
The Medium pattern only makes sense for this system. If you copied the Medium template, you would get a page without a header, without navigation, without any buttons. Designing a beautiful page is much easier if you don’t need to think about how this page will fit into a larger and more complex information structure.
Most importantly: Medium is not a website. This is Medium. Everything that you create here belongs to them. Medium is the same CMS as Blogger. This is a content creation system for a special platform that accumulates this content.

So do not mislead me. Of course Medium is cool. The user interface for creating pages is as minimalistic and intuitive as you can imagine. Medium is excellent: it simplifies working with content as many users want. They created a stable, elegant and standardized platform. This is a CMS with one elegant template. However, it does not go to any comparison with the CMS used for business purposes.

Summing up, let's say: content management systems work with templates. They can have one pattern or many. If you can't do what you want using templates — they are holding you back creatively or technically — you must either standardize it and create a new template, or abandon the CMS you are using and create something exclusive for big money.

Not surprisingly, designers hate CMS. If we are going to make any progress in creating content for the web, we should not create a new template or invent a new data type. We need to change the very principle of CMS with content. This is where a modular approach to content comes to our rescue.

We need a modular approach to content.

Content creation today requires an incredible amount of planning, work and flexibility. First of all, we need to spend a lot of time on strategic planning in order to create something that will suit our audience and achieve its goals. The work on creating the content that we have planned requires a lot of effort: every word, every picture requires separate processing. You need to be able to understand what we are saying, how we say it and to whom - in order to adapt and create an adequate presentation. It is especially difficult to be flexible when technological barriers stand in the way: when the template does not allow you to do what you want, simply because at the time when it was developed, no one knew what exactly you would do in the future. All these things put enormous pressure on the work of the designer.

We need a way to work with content that will relieve some of this pressure, will not force us to plan every thing we will ever want to do, generating a complex system with a bunch of settings and a million details. We need something that will allow us to show our creativity at the right time and not to look for solutions beyond the limits of CMS. Many people are struggling to solve this problem (we are not alone), but we have already come a long way in this direction.

What conditions should our CMS meet?

Must be the priority of content without compromising the design. Unlike the snowfalling examples that we saw, we need something that will allow us to stay within the framework of a design that helps focus attention. What we want to tell and show is too important for us to distract our audience with various special effects. We need a tool that will support our intellectual leadership.
There must be a real return on the effort. This means that using the new system you can easily and with pleasure create content and manage it. And you need to be able to do it with the regularity with which we want. Each time it should be easier for us.
Minimal bloat patterns, good scalability and stability.

We need a modular approach to content. Remember that sketch I mentioned at the beginning? Reflecting on all of this — over the struggle that we wage when designing web content; over the pressure that we experience from outside; over constant stress, when we need to foresee everything and at the same time do not fall into the creation of millions of templates; over the frustration about CMS limitations - I sketched a picture of how the ideal template for our platform might look like.

I slept with that. The next day I began to think further about how this template can work inside our CMS. I began to think in which cases he could work well, and what his limitations would be. And made a sketch on the board.

Then I shared the idea with our team, we jointly refined it, removed the limitations that initially seemed inevitable to me, and in less than a month we transferred our CMS to the next level, completely changing our approach to working with content. So, this is what we have come to, and how it works. This is not a new template, this is a new approach to creating content.

How the modular approach to content works

Unlike the field on the form, in which you can enter text and insert images using the WYSIWYG editor, or in contrast to the template, which already has space for text and multimedia, the modular approach to content allows us to add any content as independent blocks. This approach allows you to create ad hoc pages, when text and multimedia are added in different combinations and proportions, depending on the current task. , , , . , «» .

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