Content modeling

What is content modeling?

A content model is a description and configuration of all the different types of content you intend to manage in a CMS. Content models are much like the foundation of a building because they are the base framework on which the content in your organization is organized. It prepares your CMS to organize and store your content. 

You define your content model by analyzing your content and breaking down the logical idea of a type of content (such as a Press Release) into smaller attributes (such as Title, Published Date, Body, and so on). 

• Content type – A group of properties that describe a logical type of content. Content types are the formats your content takes such as blogs, product pages, case studies, team biographies, and so on. Each type of content your brand creates falls under a distinct content type. If you run an ecommerce website, you might have a lot of content like product pages, customer reviews, and how-to guides. If you work at a SaaS company, you might have whitepapers, blog posts, and case studies. Each content type comes with a unique set of requirements and fields, but they all follow a consistent structure.
• Attribute (Property, Field) – An attribute of data, such as a Title, is called a property. Properties are of a specific data type (text, number, date, and so on) and might be governed by more specific validation rules.  See also Building blocks of content modeling.

Some CMS systems make you enter this information in a user interface, while others let you configure it using code files.

A great content model provides you with:

• The precision to ensure your content is accurately described.
• The usability to accurately and easily represent the model to editors creating your content.
• The validation to prevent content anomalies and the resulting experience problems.
• The flexibility to adapt or change the content model as your organization’s requirements change.

As channels and customer touchpoints expand, having a CMS with robust capabilities is critical for meeting current and future customer experience needs.

Why is content modeling important?

In the early days of web content management (WCM) and page creation, you related your content model to site and page construction; that is, a site constructed for an event might have content models for speaker biographies and presentation agendas. A content model was important for the consistency of navigation, and the author's experience to make it clear what was required for a “complete” content entry.

However, as the world moved to a greater focus on customer experience and omnichannel delivery, content models are more important than ever. Event information, videos, and transcripts may display directly in Google search results (which requires the implementation of structured data standards).

You can use social channels to promote, link, and resurface valuable information. Greater emphasis is placed on not just applying a clear and consistent experience to everyone but also delivering the right content to the right audience, so you need to know about the intended audience and topics. As a result,  you need to understand the demands placed on the creation and distribution process of content and how and why it is used.

In this way, content models are foundational.

Proper schema configuration is crucial for application performance and usability. The same is true for content modeling, which drives employee and customer experience. These benefits are a direct result of an implementation's underlying content model. The quality of that content model is a direct result of the modeling tools your content management system (CMS) provides.

A well-designed content model returns benefits for your immediate project and sustained advantages over the long term, as you are more easily able to reuse your content and adapt it to new channels.

Conversely, a poorly designed content model weighs down your immediate project, causing development delays and obstacles to meeting requirements. But even worse is the longer-term impact — it will cause problems and frustrations for your editors. The negative impact of a poor content model on editorial usability alone is often the primary reason editors want to replace their CMS.

• A deep investigation of the content modeling features of any CMS you consider always pays off, as you can uncover deficiencies that would cause pain.
• An analysis forces you to question your own assumptions and evaluate your content from a more analytical standpoint.

AI and automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) can help you suggest fields, ways to optimize your content, or create personalized versions for different audience segments. With AI embedded into your content model, it could potentially learn from your data, fine-tune content recommendations for specific user segments, and adjust how and where content is served up based on user behavior.

Automation also plays a major role in scaling content production. For instance, AI-powered content creation tools can automatically generate product descriptions or blog posts based on a predefined content model, letting you focus on more strategic stuff instead of writing and rewriting content.

Content modeling questions and answers

The following questions and answers help you gather the information needed to make an informed decision, prepare for a transition to your CMS (SaaS) platform, and ensure long-term success. 

Basics

A content object is labeled data. The following questions provide basic points of evaluation.

• Does the CMS let you specify custom types?

  CMS (Saas) lets you add properties and specify new content types.

• Can you extend the built-in property types with your own custom types?

  CMS (SaaS) lets you store custom, unique data, or provide a custom editorial interface for a specific property. 

• Are there limitations on content types? 

  Each unique CMS (SaaS) bundle of properties is considered a “type” of content.

• Can you restrict the data allowed in a property?

  CMS (SaaS) ensures that labeled data is of a certain type and can specify that a property should be only numeric or a valid date of an arbitrary precision (just the date, for example, or the date and time).

• What format is used to retrieve the content data?

  When you work with CMS (SaaS) content, predictable types of data make it easier to manipulate and transform it.

  • When you retrieve a content object during templating or an API operation—the local API or a headless/remote API—it is strongly typed.

  • The content can auto-populate a strongly typed object specific to the underlying programming.

• Can you apply validation rules to properties?

  Beyond data types, CMS (SaaS) lets you specify domain-specific rules around content entry.

  • Specify that a particular property is required.

  • Specify an allowed range—for instance, it must be a numeric value above 10 but less than 100.

  • Specify that a date value must be in the future or the past.

  • Apply a regular expression pattern matching on the value, to ensure that it’s a valid email address or phone number or conforms to some other pattern.

  • Apply rules if a value is entered so that null values are universally allowable.

• Can you provide custom validation rules?

  In addition to pre-configured validation rules, you might need to validate property values against custom data sources (like ensuring a product number represents a valid product in your external product catalog). CMS (SaaS) provides a framework for this.

• How does the CMS handle content files?

  Content goes beyond structured text—it also includes files like images, documents, audio, and video.

  • Media files like images and PDF documents are considered full-content objects.

  • You can model media files with properties like other content types.

  • They are subject to the same features as other content, like permissions and workflow.

Relational modeling

Most content modeling is discrete, which refers to the modeling of a content object unto itself. However, in many cases, you want to connect content objects to other objects by forming relationships.

• Does the CMS support a content hierarchy?

  Content is often organized in parent-child structures, where the content is represented as a conceptual “tree” where new content is created as a “child” of existing content, and these relationships can be traversed and referenced to render navigation and other aggregational concepts.

  • CMS supports a parent-child content structure.

  • You can have more than one tree.

  • You can display content in more than one location in the tree.

  • The CMS (SaaS) hierarchy supports type restrictions by letting you create objects of a certain type as children of another type.

• Can you reference a property to another content object?

  A specific property on a specific type might need to be a live reference to another content object. For example, the Manager property of your Employee Profile object might need to conceptually point to another object in the repository.

  • CMS (SaaS) lets you refer to other objects in this way.

  • You can limit the selection of a target object by type or other criteria.

• Can you enforce referential links?

  Much like referential integrity in a relational database, some links should be enforced and validated.

  • CMS (SaaS) lets you refer to another content object to ensure that a link remains intact.

  • You can cancel deletion and warn the editor that an object is linked to from other objects.

• Can you encapsulate a content object in a property?

  CMS (SaaS) lets a property's value be a completely self-contained content object that exists inside the lifecycle of the parent content object rather than referring to another content object.

Editorial experience

A CMS generates an editorial interface from the defined content model, so the editorial experience is inextricable from content modeling. A key point of evaluation is how the CMS uses the content model to optimize editorial usability.

• How usable is the editorial interface generated from the content model?

  Consider how each property and its datatype contributes to its editorial UI. CMS (SaaS) is well-organized and usable for the average editor.

• Can you provide contextual help in the editorial UI?

  Editors sometimes need help understanding the details of the content model. CMS (SaaS) provides additional editing instructions to help editors understand how to manage the content.

• Can you group properties into sub-interfaces?

  CMS (SaaS) lets you organize properties into tabs or expandable sections, which is critical when editing a complicated object. You can display certain fields or sub-interfaces to certain users or groups of users.

• Can you edit rich text properties?

  CMS (SaaS) uses a rich text editor (TinyMCE) that you can configure for editors. You also can examine and sanitize the HTML before storing the content.

• Can you associate content files with content?

  When editors need to embed an image in rich text or link to a downloadable file, they need to locate assets. When these assets are linked, CMS (SaaS) retains the reference so that you can check and enforce the dependencies.

• What types of page or narrative composition are available?

  More visually complex content might have to be visually composed from multiple content objects. CMS (SaaS) lets you:

  • Construct content from a library of reusable elements.

  • Arrange these elements on a page surface.

  • Order serially to provide an unbroken stretch of narrative content.

Technical considerations

In addition to editors, the content model will intersect directly with your technical and development teams. There are several features that can ease their burden when managing the model and the content it contains.

• How is the content model defined?

  Some systems require you to model from a UI, while others let you specify the content model in code or configuration files which can be checked into source control, versioned, and moved through a DevOps process.

  • CMS (SaaS) process fits with your DevOps process.

  • CMS (SaaS) lets your content modeling specifications and changes move through your different development and testing environments.

• How can the content model be changed after it’s populated?

  Content models evolve, and when they are weighed down with actual content, this can be complicated.

  • After you enter hundreds or thousands of content objects, CMS (SaaS) lets you change the content model, or underlying type of existing content.

  • You can reconcile differing content definitions without the loss of data.

• How do user and group permissions intersect with the content model?

  Not every editor should have access to every type or property. CMS (SaaS) lets you:

  • Bind your create and edit permissions to a content type definition so that only certain authors can work with specific types.

  • Apply permissions in individual properties so that only certain authors can edit those properties.

  • Specify a type as a singleton, so that only one object of that type can exist.

  • Integrate external content with levels of repository abstraction, where you can populate sections of the content repository from external systems in real-time. You can also mass-upload or intake and update the API from external sources.