The Front End of a Structured CMS
- Separation of content from presentation (format). Enables multi-channel publishing.
- Create smaller chunks of information that can be assembled into different end documents.
Structuring content has many benefits:
- It allows content to be tagged according to its meaning (for example, a warning can be tagged as warning and a note can be tagged as note), and content can be hierarchically structured (books contain chapters; chapters contain sections; sections contain paragraphs, lists, and tables, and so on).
- It allows you to embed metadata into the content (an element may have certain attributes). For example, a list may be ordered or unordered; a procedure might be easy, medium, or hard; a feature description might be for the North American version or for he European version.
- It allows the separation of content from formatting, and formatting may be applied automatically using a template. For example, the same XML source content can be laid out for print or output as HTML, depending on the template used.
It facilitates the reuse of content. Document components authored in FrameMaker can be stored in a content management system and reused across multiple documents; a change in one component can ripple through a whole body of documents.
It enables collaborative authoring. By using FrameMaker and a content management system, multiple authors can maintain document components independently. The combination of these factors can lead to significant cost and time savings. For example, in localization, the reuse of components means less content needs to be translated for each new publication.
Also, content can be automatically formatted (for multiple media types, if need be) using templates once it has been translated.
Hierarchical structure and embedded metadata can be used to automatically filter content for personalization. Once filtered, that content can be automatically formatted using templates.