Managing Content in a Headless CCMS

The key benefit of a headless CCMS revolves around a clear separation of content management from content delivery. But while many headless solutions do this easily, what they don’t do well is provide an authoring experience that enables technical writers, marketers, and other business people to manage their content well. Today, I want to talk about the right way to manage content in your headless CCMS.

Start with a Structured Content Model

The first step to managing content right is creating a structured content model. A clear breakdown of a content item into its elements and attributes enables the delivery of that content to multiple channels. The addition of metadata to those elements means you can leverage the content you create on your website, your tech doc portal, business application, voice assistant, smart device, digital assistant, and more.

Your CCMS should provide a place to define this content model. It enables you to create content types with associated elements and attributes, as well as a taxonomy for both topics and audiences.

Content level permissions are something else to consider when you define your content model. Often, you will create and manage content that is available only to certain groups, and you will need the ability to assign permissions accordingly.

Provide a Better Authoring Experience

Where many CCMS solutions fall short is in the authoring experience. It’s easy enough to tell content authors and editors to fill in form fields to create content, but there’s a lot more that goes into content creation and management.

In a headless CCMS, the authoring experience is robust. It provides all the core capabilities of content authoring, including adding, editing, and tagging content, but it goes further by providing critical management capabilities for your content.

• Content Preview: A headless CCMS separates content authoring from content delivery, so seeing how the content will look in the destination channel is challenging. You need a solution that provides remote preview by simulating different destination channels so you can see how your content will look and quickly make changes.
• In-context Editing: One of the nice features of a traditional CMS is the ability to edit your content in-context (edit a web page directly). A headless CCMS should also provide the same capability if your delivery tier is also within the CCMS.
• Governance: There are many important governance features that aren’t available in a headless solution, including URL redirects, link management, accessibility, SEO, spelling and grammar, and others. But the right headless CCMS will support many of these features.
• Scheduling: Content has a shelf life. But that shelf life may be different depending on where the content is published or the version of the content. The ability to set up review schedules, as well as the end of life schedules for content is something a headless CCMS can offer.

Another benefit of a headless CCMS is that you have the best of both worlds in terms of how you create content experiences. The content API enables the publishing of content to websites, applications, and other channels. But there are situations where you might prefer to use the CCMS deployment tier to serve your content. Your website is one example. A custom knowledgebase or portal are others.

Robust Workflow and Reporting

Workflow is another key capability of a headless CCMS. Content goes through a review and approval process that involves more than one person. Which is why workflow is so crucial to content management.

When you set up your content environment and define your content strategy, you outline workflow processes in the CCMS to manage your content. Some of the basic workflow processes include:

• Check-in/Check-out: To manage content that multiple authors/editors work on.
• Versioning: You may want to work on a new version of your content while an older version is published. Or you may want to publish a new version only to certain channels.
• Review and approval: Content may go through multiple reviews and approvals.
• The publishing of content (and the unpublishing of content) through start and end dates.
• Translation workflows for content that is published in more than one language.

You can also bridge workflows creating a more intricate set of processes to ensure content is managed and published properly. For example, a review and approval workflow is the first step, followed by a translation workflow, followed by a publishing workflow.

Reporting features give you a high-level view of your content, its current stages, where it is deployed, and more.

Managing Digital Assets

Most content models focus only on text-based content. But as more and more content is comprised of digital assets like images, videos, podcasts, and documents, it’s just as important to apply your content model to these assets.

The right headless CCMS will enable you to map taxonomy and metadata to your digital assets and it will support workflow processes that include these assets, even if they don’t live within the CCMS itself.

Ensuring Content Agility

Too often, people don’t consider all the effort that goes into creating content, especially when you have solutions that offer simple input forms and consider content creation done. Whether you publish content to a website, a customer portal, tech doc site, or somewhere else, you need to be able to manage that content according to defined rules and processes. A headless CCMS supports multi-channel publishing while ensuring you have the proper content management on the back end.