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Golden Use Case: Easy, Day-to-Day Publishing

Key Points:

  • All organizations should focus on easy, day-to-day publishing ← tweet
  • Publishing should be streamlined for common tasks (and not for unusual situations) ← tweet
  • Easy publishing should always be a priority, on an ongoing basis and with big redesigns ← tweet

Fundamentally we need to have strong, end-to-end publishing. This should be highly prioritized in any implementation, and also for ongoing improvements. 

The steps

Obviously the steps need to be developed that are specific to your organization's needs — as a starter: 

  1. Start from a blank slate (the content publisher isn’t already logged into the CMS).
  2. Content publisher logs into the CMS.
  3. Content publisher initiates publishing a new piece of content, preferably indicating the content type — not file type (PDF, Excel file, image, movie, etc) or some technical type of how your CMS will render the content. The way the content publisher thinks about the content*, not how the CMS /forces/ the publisher to think about it. 
  4. Content publisher enters information to publish content.
  5. Content publisher previews, preferably across multiple representative device screen sizes, what the entire page / other common representations
  6. Content publisher either publishes the content or submits to workflow (in the case of workflow then it should flow through all approvals leading to publish)
  7. Content appears

* There often does need to be an education process with content publishers to think in terms of structured content types rather than pages, and *sometimes* it makes sense to continue with a very page-based approach. But nonetheless there is a logical way of talking about content (people don’t walk down the hallway talking about creating a static web page but about publishing a press release). 

Things to watch out for

On step 4 above:

 

  1. Only be the information the content publisher needs to enter (no extraneous or duplicative fields)
  2. Require a minimal of formatting, especially any HTML (like explicitly applying certain classes)
  3. Not allow any formatting that will be stripped out anyway or that is not desirable
  4. Be as natural a way of entering each field (dates should be entered as dates with perhaps a calendar option for example, references to other content should be managed, images should allow whatever processes are routine, taxonomy fields should be constrained)
  5. Should streamline day-to-day publishing and not edge (or gee-whiz) cases
  6. If assets need to be added to the page, the assets can be managed as part of the flow (rather than breaking the flow)

How to measure success

  • Mental burden on the content publisher. 
  • How well the system steers the publisher toward “doing the right thing”
  • Time it takes from end-to-end to publish

Mitigating factors

The amount of effort to expend on implementing this use case is mitigated by two factors: the number of publishers (the smaller the number, the less urgent this is) and the frequency of publishing. 

First published 15 June 2017