How do Component Content Management Systems Work?

If you are from one of those who are working in an business enterprise, or manage a complex website that spans hundreds of pages of diverse content, chances are that the idea of a Content Management System is not new to you. From mid scale to humongous sized businesses deploy these software systems to manage the data that essentially runs their business, in an efficient and effective manner. Web Content Authors also use CMS, albeit of a little different type, to manage the content on their sites that would otherwise take a lot of people to get control of. Both of these types of CMS manage the content at a level of abstraction known as document level. A document is the smallest unit that these systems deploy as their output. This document could be made up of text. Images, and in case of digital documents, may be pictures and videos.

But sometimes the need arises of accessing the content at a much more granular level. Traditional CMSs becomes useless as far as such needs are concerned. So there is another type of CMS systems, which are rather a concept than a physical system, known as Component Content Management Systems.

A Component CMS uses much smaller items or components as their basic unit of output generation and hence can organize and manipulate content in an entirely different way, which is more efficient and reliable. A component can be a single topic, a paragraph, a concept or an asset like image, audio or video. These individual components are assembled to form content assemblies or content types that can be viewed as traditional document. But even after taking form of a complete document, each component can has an attributes as well as lifecycle of its own and it can be tracked down individually as the part of that assembly.

So in this way, the Component CMS works its way out from individual components to a complete document. Because of their very nature, Component CMSs can be used a standalone system or as a part of a bigger, more complex CMS also. The benefits of using these systems are manifold. Using these systems, redundancy of data is removed as the same component can be used to create multiple documents. Delivery cost is reduced since no duplicate components are delivered, one copy is used everywhere. Plus if the system requires some translation of content, which is quiet common in Web CMSs, the translation cost is also reduced as a component is needed to be translated only once.