<!-- Content Here -->

Where content meets technology

Jun 17, 2009

Pages and Objects

Back in prehistoric times, I was implementing a custom CMS for a very large computer manufacturer. The data model drew a distinction between "pages" and "objects" and I remember having a difficult time understanding (and then, later, explaining) the difference. At a high level, objects were items of content (like a "product") and pages were containers (like a landing page that lists collections objects). The areas where my simplistic explanation tended to break down were 1) the notion of a detail page that just displayed one object and 2) unmanaged listing pages that just automatically listed objects. These were the cases where you would have pages on the site that do not map to "pages" in the repository. If you were to practice the page/object model in its truest form, you would create a page asset to wrap objects for every page on the site. This didn't make sense when you had a product catalog with thousands of items (objects) in it. Over time, the page content type became less and less used until it was defined as strictly as a tool for building landing (also known as category) pages. That made sense because the site was really about the products and displaying them in lots of different ways. But if this had been a project to build a typical brochure site (where contributors focused on managing things like the "about" page or the "services" page) we may have gone in the other direction and focused on pages. Objects would have diminished to components that could be re-used across pages.

Another way to look at is to ask who owns the pages, the contributor or the display tier? In a page based model the user owns the page. He places the page in a site hierarchy, gives it a URL, and then fills it with content. In the object based model, the contributor feeds in the content and the display tier (the controllers and the views) has the logic to decide what content to show and how to show it. Like I mentioned in my computer manufacturer website story, the object based approach tends to do better with sites that have more content than is practical to manually organize onto pages. In an extreme example, think about if www.google.com was a website that someone had to manage. No matter how many editors they hired, it would be impossible for an editorial staff to manage every single result page. Maybe they could go in and fix the descriptions of a few index entries here and there.

When I look at web content management systems today, I see similar stories to my prehistoric custom web content management system experience. Every web content management system on the market today grew out of some project to build a website and then was abstracted to build more websites. A WCMS is either conceived as a product and then heavily shaped by its earliest customers or it starts life as an in-house project and then is abstracted into something that could be resold. Those initial uses leave their imprint and become part of the product's DNA. That doesn't mean that products are necessarily limited in their use. As it matures, a product runs into diverse range of potential customers that forces it to broaden its capabilities. In the real world, of course, web sites are combination of pages and objects and the contributor needs at least some level of control of both. However, this digital DNA does help determine what problems it solves more naturally (or comfortably, or intuitively) than others. Page based systems need to figure out a clean way to manage "placeless" content and object based systems need to figure out a simple way to manage basic pages. Some of these additions feel more awkward than others.

The only way to really appreciate the difference in approach and its implications for you is by demonstrating the products managing a site like yours with content like yours. I like the scenario approach where you (or the vendor) build a prototype using your content types and then testing it with your typical usage scenarios. It is only then that you will see how well it addresses your balance of objects and pages.