Delegating Content Creation

 

There are two main scenarios for updating and maintaining your sites content. Which one you will pick depends on your personal preferences and on the organisational set-up of your business or organisation.

Your website articles can be maintained both from the website itself (the front-end) and the administrator site (the back-end). There are important differences between the two approaches which we will explain now.

Front-end Maintenance

The CMS has four front-end user groups.

• Registered
• Author
• Editor
• Publisher

A registered user has no special privileges for content creation. They can view items marked as viewable for registered users only.

An author has the ability to create new articles in any content section or category and edit their own articles. Articles created by an author are initially unpublished and will be pending until they are published by an authorised user. When a new content item is created, the system sends a notification message to the site administrator which is retrievable in the administrator site.

The publishing settings when creating content allow for articles to be published at a future date and time and also to be expired at a certain date and time.

Editors have all the capabilities as authors and can review and edit any articles written by any author or themselves but still cannot publish the articles if they are unpublished. The role of the editor is to make sure that the content submitted by the author(s) is of a desired standard.

Publishers have all the capabilities as editors and have the ability to publish any article written by anybody. Naturally, they can also create content and publish it themselves.

So a possible scenario for a delegated content management team could look like this: there could be one or more authors responsible for creating articles for various sections or categories on your website. Content created by these authors could be edited by an editor whose responsibility would be to ensure a certain standard of writing and quality of content. Finally a publisher would simply approve content items for publishing on the site. Of course, the editor could in reality also be the publisher to skip a step in the workflow hierarchy if a simpler publishing structure is desired.
If the site and team are small then there could simply be just a publisher writing and publishing all articles.

Back-end Maintenance

Back-end access is divided into three levels:

• Manager
• Administrator
• Super Administrator

Those back end access levels pertain more to other aspects of administering your website.

As far as content maintenance goes, all three levels have the same abilities to create, review and publish content. This keeps things simple and this way of content maintenance is suited for sites maintained by one or two people. So if you are, for example, running a personal website, you would simply create an administrator account for yourself (or just use the super administrator account) and write and publish the content for all sections and categories yourself.

Note that managers have restricted abilities to perform administrative tasks on the website and their role is more focused on content maintenance.