We’ve Always Modeled Content

“We’ve always modeled content.”

That was the first thing I said to myself after reading the A List Apart article Content Modelling: A Master Skill by Rachel Lovinger.

Rachel details the idea and work behind breaking website content and pages into different data buckets (in our case this would be Channel Custom Fields and Channels). Content modelling is important because we need make sure the people managing the website have the control they need over the content. Does that sidebar paragraph about the site need to be edited on occasion? Make sure you store it in a way that the website team can update it.

As people who develop with and on ExpressionEngine, content modelling seems obvious to us. This is what we’ve always done. It is an important part of being a competent web developer. It is not something that we should just leave to someone else to do.

To demonstrate this, read through this article by Justin Reynolds on content modelling with ExpressionEngine.

If you’re going to model content effectively you need a content management system that makes it as painless as possible to organise information into well defined data containers. I thought I’d take a moment to outline why I think ExpressionEngine by EllisLabs (sic) does this so well. It’s the primary reason I use it as my standard content management solution for larger websites. The system was designed from the ground up with flexible content modelling in mind: it makes it very straightforward to define ‘channels’ of infomation built of any type of data that can be displayed on a website: single lines of text, body copy, images, multimedia files, PDFs and other downloadable files, dates, categories - and so on. I’ll stress from the outset that I’m sure there are other systems that also handle content modelling well - it’s just that I like the way ExpressionEngine does it.