CMS 2005: Compound Content

In most publications, whether interactive or print, the units of content delivered to end customers are often themselves comprised from several components. For example, a feature article might comprise of structured text (including a title, teaser, body, facts boxes and so on) and several images. Traditional content management systems have tended to ignore this fact, forcing publishers to maintain references between components – for instance, placing links to images residing in library folders into article texts.

The problem with this approach is that such references are not maintained automatically, leading to a gradual erosion of content organization and integrity. Furthermore, the requirement to maintain references between content impacts productivity. For example, many Web developers will be familiar with content management systems in which HTML texts reference images located in a global “image directory”. Typically, the number of images in such directories grows quickly, but since it is unclear which images are actively referenced by the texts, none can be deleted creating “zombie files”. When the image directory finally becomes full, and some files have to be deleted, broken links result, as seen on many websites today.

System 7 CMS solves this problem for publishers by providing the facility to create compound articles, which may be stored and manipulated in the category hierarchy just like any simple media file or document, but which are comprised of a combination of XHTML or XML text and any number of associated media files. Management is simplified, and clever technology enables article texts to refer to media items using only their names, such as 1.img, rather than complete URLs.