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A discussion that’s boiling up every now and then is the question about page based versus object based web content management (WCM) systems and the perceived complexity of object based systems. Recognizing that there is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ I’d like to highlight some of the key differences and benefits of the object based model over page based for slightly more advanced websites. Having worked with both types of systems (Alterian offers both), I can tell you this from my own personal experience.
A page based system is easiest to understand. There is a site hierarchy, and somewhere in that site tree one can create a page which maps directly to a page that a visitor would be able to visit. Even though there will be some structure on the page like a heading, an introduction and a body text, this is typically driven through styles in the text area of the page. One is really adding a page in a site tree, at a specific URL. The text that a content author enters is stored in a database, and a presentation template renders additional elements on the page such as navigation and a footer. So the content is separated from the presentation, but it’s tightly coupled to its position in the site hierarchy. Furthermore it’s just a “page”. One cannot natively distinguish between for instance a page that represents a press release, and a page that represents a product description. This limits the logic you can build into your site (the web application). This is how for instance Alterian’s Content Manager (ACM) Corporate edition product works.
An object based system typically allows you to enter content in a structured format that exists for various types of information you want to store and present. Let’s take a press release as an example. You can create an item of the item-type “Press Release” and populate that with a title, teaser, body text, release date and other (definable) fields relevant to a press release. The item is stored in the database, but there is not a relation to a page in the site tree (yet). It’s just a content object. This is how Alterian’s Content Manager (ACM) Professional & Enterprise Edition products work. When combined with a presentation template and a location in the site tree, it becomes visible as a web page.
There are a number of fundamental differences with the page based approach, such as:
- One can easily assign all sorts of attributes (meta information) to a content object which do not need to be presentable content, such as keywords, a release date or anything else. This can be used by presentation logic in the site, for instance to create a listing of all press releases sorted by release date. In a page based system this would be a lot more difficult to do.
- Because the underlying object is not tied to a specific URL, it can be reused in other spots on the website too, with another URL. One could for instance decide to present just the title and teaser of that same content object in a ‘Latest News’ area on the homepage. Or even present the story on another website, with a different presentation template. This makes content reuse much easier and cleaner. A page based system typically has no (or clumsy) ways of re-using content.
From these two examples it’s easy to see the added power of the object based model. The crux is how a Web CMS presents the object based model to the content author and how easy or difficult it is to understand and operate.
With our ACM Professional and Enterprise edition products we have gone a long way in making it just as easy to use as a page based system. In a typical scenario a user would still browse to a branch in the site tree, right click and select ‘Add New Page’, select a template to determine its look & feel and start typing the content. ACM then invisibly creates an underlying content object, based on the selected template, thus completely hiding the perceived complexity of the object based model. By doing that one combines the best of both worlds: being able to use the power of the object based approach, combined with the simplicity of the page based model.
For very straightforward page based websites, the page model may work well, but in my opinion content authors these days need the flexibility of the object based model to build websites that allow their web application to make decisions based on the type of content being presented, and that enable proper content re-use without imposing additional effort or duplication of content .
Please share your views and experiences on this topic!
Great information.
Is it difficult to switch from page-based system to object based system?
And if your site is originally built on page-based system, when switch over to object-based one, do you need to redo all the meta information and other content?
Hi Evelyn,
Thanks for your post. The ease with which one can switch – from a content perspective – heavily depends on the CMS you currently use, and how easy it is to extract content from it in a structured manner. If the amount of data is large enough, an automated way of transferring content would be preferable. It means though that individual fields or pieces of data must be distinguishable, because those are separated from one another in a object based system. So can tell you what’s the title, the teaser, the body text, a publication date etc. in an automated way? For our own ACM Corporate edition we have built a tool to do the data transfer to ACM Professional in case clients want to upgrade. Alternatively (with smaller amounts of data) you’d have to rely on copying and pasting content across, and populating the correct fields in the object based CMS. From the viewpoint of the user switching to an object based CMS should be easy as long as it has been designed with ease-of-use and the business user in mind. Hope that helps.