theCMSblog

You’ve heard the phrase “the whole is greater than sum of its parts.” Well, when it comes to content, I don’t agree. When managing content, the value parts can be much greater value than the whole.

The vast majority of content in the world is written in the form of “documents.” Documents, by their nature, are intended to communicate a single idea, fact, or concept. Some documents are long and others very short. Regardless, authors tend to create their documents in such a way that you can’t just extract a paragraph from the middle, read it on its own, and understand it. You need the context of at least the beginning of the document to glean any meaning from it.

Then along came the idea of “compontentizing” content. What this essentially means is breaking down a document into smaller pieces (components) that can “stand alone” in their own right, and still provide meaning. (Note: Within the component, the content is often sub-divided even further into what some call “elements”.)

Technical documentation was one of the first areas where content components came into their own. This practice was also known as “single-sourcing”. But recently, the Web is where content components are having their heyday.

So, why are content components important? Largely for efficiency when encountering specific communication needs, including:

• Re-using content across different publications of the same kind, like two different versions of a user manual that share common content in some areas.
• Publishing content for different media – namely print, Help files, and the Web.
• Personalizing content based on the audience—for either print or online use.
• Assembling “landing pages” that lists short introductions to longer documents.

A lot of people still create Web pages in the “document-centric” way of thinking. When they want to add a page to their Web site, they sit down and write it like a document. Problem is, all the information is then trapped in this single document and can’t vary by user or be reused elsewhere without creating a copy of it. Once you have multiple copies of the same document floating around, that spells trouble.

Web content management systems (including XML-based systems) handle componentized content very well because the content is stored in a database field, or in multiple XML files that represent different “chunks” of information. The beauty of these systems is that these “chunks” of content can be automatically assembled back into documents according to rules.

Creating, storing, and managing your content as components provides huge value in terms of flexibility to publish the content in multiple places and to customize it for multiple audiences. So, when dealing with content, you may indeed find yourself in a place where the sum of the parts (components) is much greater than that of the whole (document).