0 Portable Content and Bigsteepl
As I sat in the bathroom looking at a blank sketch book, my mind began thinking about the infinite problem of cost for small churches. I realized that content management really isn’t the hardest part.
As much as I would like to believe that small churches will faithfully update their websites, it’s just not realistic. Managing a website is a big responsibility and managing the actual content is just one small part of it.
You look at tools like Twitter, Facebook and even just a run of the mill web application and you find that a lot of these apps are offering an API. Developers often take those API’s and create mash-ups and or a completely different application based on the API of another app. Why can’t content management work this way?
Content Should Be Portable
Lets say I build this awesome content management app called ContentApp. Now naturally the content inside ContentApp would be used in a website directly connected to ContentApp. In other words, the website and ContentApp would be one giant application which is normal. But what if ContentApp wasn’t connected to the website at all? What if it simply managed silos of content such as podcasts, blogs and photo galleries, but did nothing else? We’d have a large collection of content with no website to put it on.
Now we have ourselves a problem. We built this app that only manages content with no website to put this content on. The solution to this is an API. Instead of seeing content management as a coupled and heavily proprietary part of a website, we need to see content management as portable and decoupled. Can you imagine the flexibility for developers who build websites for small churches? It’s huge!
The API Offers Integration
When you build an API for a content management app, you then solve the problem of integration. In the case of integration with Radiant (a Ruby on Rails CMS) this would be a match made in heaven. Currently Radiant is a best-of-breed CMS for when you need to manage a dynamic set of web pages that may or may not have frequently updated content. When it comes to podcasting, blogging or managing a photo gallery, the extensions (add-ons) can be rather ugly and unsatisfying in terms of management/administration. Sometimes these features are just plain non-existent.
Sigh
All in all an API would solve ContentApp’s problem of not having an associated website. You can then provide integration docs for other CMS’ that suck at managing content. Can you sense the irony? Then again, these are just the ideas of lone web designer.