Book review: Bob Boiko's CM-Bible

Note that I'm not all through this book, will update later.

Introduction

States the obvious reasons for why Content Management is needed (underlies e-business), informations frenzy, information age, etc.

Part 1: What is Content?

Seems to be a nice place to start. Get the definitions sorted out in an introductory way.

Chapter 1: Defining Data, Information and Content

I was previously used to defining use a definition of data/information/knowledge, but perhaps the Content Management Camp share the Knowledge Management Camp's love for coining new definitions.

The core of this chapter is to define the words Information, and mostly Content, which will be used through the rest of the book.

Given that I know what data and information pretty well, the only surprising thing here is how similar the definition of Content is to that of Knowledge. The former does seem to be somewhat closer to Information (we are not ready for Knowledge Management, we need to do Content Management first).

Content is Information put to use.

Content is Information plus data. By applying a small tag of metadata to information (give it a new status), it might become content.

Liz Orna: Information is knowledge put into a communicative format.

Content is information that you tag with data so that a computer can organize and systematize its collection, management and publishing.

Chapter 2: Content has Format

Binary and nonbinary (ascii, xml) are storage formats.

Be consistent in formatting (use styles/schemes/standards).

Separate format from content so you can reuse.

Format can be categorized into: formatting by effect, method or scope. Funny categorization..

Overall, a very narrow chapter about details in text-composition that for most parts have been overcomed.

Chapter 3: Content has Structure

Content can divide into content types, segmenting into content components, which can be divided into elements, which can relate to other elements by way of outline, index, cross-reference and sequence.

Structure is part of the metadata. It is hard to agree and settle on a structure that can be used for information, and even worse, the structure will change over time.

You can structure by purpose, type or scope.

Overall, a small chapter about a very important aspect.

Chapter 4: Functionality is Content, too!

Indeed, I couldn't agree more. Functionality is content, and the ability to extend and modify functionality should be part of CMS evaluation.

To be continued....

PS: What the ### is up with Writely's line-breaks? Can't I pleeeeeeaase get to edit the html directly?

Comments

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Encrypting and Decrypting with Spring

I was recently working with protecting some sensitive data in a typical Java application with a database underneath. We convert the data on its way out of the application using Spring Security Crypto Utilities . It "was decided" that we'd be doing AES with a key-length of 256 , and this just happens to be the kind of encryption Spring crypto does out of the box. Sweet! The big aber is that whatever JRE is running the application has to be patched with Oracle's JCE in order to do 256 bits. It's a fascinating story , the short version being that U.S. companies are restricted from exporting various encryption algorithms to certain countries, and some countries are restricted from importing them. Once I had patched my JRE with the JCE, I found it fascinating how straight forward it was to encrypt and decrypt using the Spring Encryptors. So just for fun at the weekend, I threw together a little desktop app that will encrypt and decrypt stuff for the given password

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git tools for keeping patches on top of moving upstreams

At work, we maintain patches for some pretty large open source repositories that regularly release new versions, forcing us to update our patches to match. So far, we've been using basic Git operations to transplant our modifications from one major version of the upstream to the next. Every time we make such a transplant, we simply squash together the modifications we made in the previous version, and land it as one big commit into the next version. Those who are used to very stringent keeping of Git history may wrinkle their nose at this, but it is a pragmatic choice. Maintaining modifications on top of the rapidly changing upstream is a lot of work, and so far we haven't had the opportunity to figure out a more clever way to do it. Nor have we really suffered any consequences of not having an easy to read history of our modifications - it's a relatively small amount of patches, after all. With a recent boost in team size, we may have that opportunity. Also the need for be

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git -> ~/.mrconfig -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git -> ~/.vimrc -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git -> ~/bin/* config-git.git -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git -> ~/.tmux.conf config-zsh.git -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o