By Corey Vilhauer CHAPTER 10Develop with a CMS that’s easy for editors to use
Well, now we’re just being silly, right? Maybe not. Let’s talk about developers.
woRKing wiTh DeveloPeRS
Despite the fact that nearly every content strategist has some issue with
the inconsistencies of content management systems, we all rely on some
kind of content management solution to make our jobs easier and our edi-
tors’ jobs relatively painless.
I say relatively, because while we’d never expect editors to go back to
manually marking up each HTML page, that doesn’t mean today’s CMS
solutions are optimal. They’re not. But we can make them better. As long as
we have a good relationship with our developers.
The content strategist/developer rift has been talked up for years.
“Developers don’t understand the needs of editors and are always looking
for fast solutions, not correct solutions,” say the content strategists. The
developers answer, “Content strategists develop impossible, complicated
solutions that we then have to implement, as though they have no knowl-
edge of how databases or programming work.” And it’s true, in some sense.
Content strategy is just now reaching a critical mass on structured, data-
base-driven content, while developers are coming around to the benefits
and efficiencies of a content-first approach.
These stereotypes are just that, though. Stereotypes. When it comes
down to it, developers and content strategists work perfectly together.
Developers want to know what kinds of copy are going to be on the web-
site, and how they’re going to interact. Content strategists benefit from
working closely with developers to create a CMS experience that editors
can understand and use.
Which brings us to the art of content modeling and how we can help
create editor-centric CMS mechanisms — even within existing CMS pack-
ages — by simply listening to our editors and gleaning what content fields
they might need.