RE: Common News Requirements

Hi John,

You can probably guess that we've done a fair bit of thinking on this
here at the BBC.

One of the biggest issues with modeling news content, as with any
content really, is how to compromise between simplicity and flexibility.
If you break up your news stories into an object for each paragraph, you
might get the potential for an amazing level of repurposing, but at the
expense of the speed of content entry "and probably the sanity of the
people doing the entering as well!) On the other hand if you just have a
big blank form in which staff can write their own HTML for the entire
story, you get no potential for reuse at all, and it's questionable
whether the CMS gives you any of the business benefits you aimed for.

Think about how you might reuse the content on multiple platforms and
devices in the future, think about how you might need to search for the
content in the future, think about how people like librarians, financial
analysts, journalists etc might need to use your content, and decide
which elements you should include in your content model.

Only you can decide what level of complexity is best for your
organization, but I would say you should err on the side of being a
little too complex rather than a little bit too simple, because you're
almost sure to notice a reason why you needed to break up that metadata
section into many fields -- just a few months after you deploy your
system. It's much easier to consolidate a few fields into one, if your
model turns out to be overkill, than to break fields into many parts
when you realize you chose the wrong level of granularity.

Bob Boiko's "Content Management Bible" goes into some detail on this,
Lou Rosenfeld's "Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" has a
little bit on it, and I think a lot of the other standard content
management books (Rockley, Hackos, etc) go into it as well.

Good luck!

Brendan.
--
Brendan Quinn
Technical Architect - Content Management and Syndication Systems
Brendan.Quinn-IQarjmkfAM9aa/[email protected]
phone  +44 (0)20 755 70075
fax    +44 (0)20 755 70055
mobile +44 (0)7900 847 358
bbc.co.uk, NW Wing, Bush House, PO Box 76, Strand, London WC2B 4PH

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