Content structure: Technical

In my Content structure: Philosophy post, we’ve talked about what content structure is, and why people make such a big deal of it. This week I’d like to tell you how we handle this with CMS.
I’ve already given you an introduction into Structured content and content types in my Joomla vs Drupal vs Wordpress post. These are the components that we’ll need to structure our data.

As an example, I will use the structure of my own website.
First of all, I have the blog, which will be the central component of the website. There will be regular posts and also announcements of what changed on the rest of the website. Next to the blog, there will be a part with articles and a part with photo galleries.

We need to separate the blog from the other parts of the website, as the way of structuring the data will be different. This is something we will do with content types.
For the blog we will use the content type Story in Drupal or Post in Wordpress. For every other part we will use the content type Page (this is the same in Wordpress and Drupal).
The pages will be structured using menus and submenus, the stories/posts will be structured using categories in Wordpress or taxonomy in Drupal

The Pages
Structuring data using menus is not really what CMS is all about. But if they contain data that’s not frequently updated, it’s often the best choice. There will be two main categories: “Articles” and “Photography”. These will be accessed by pressing a button in the main menu (I will chose for a top menu here). For both categories, there will be following subcategories:
Articles
      Travel
      Web Design
      The written word
Photography
      Travel
      People
      Projects
Like I said in the Content structure: Philosophy post, it’s necessary to do some thinking about this. Is this the level on which I want to keep working? Creating new subcategories on an existing level is easy, dividing a subcategory into new subcategories on a deeper level is a lot harder.
As these pages won’t be updated that much, the chance that new subcategories are needed is a lot lower, so I think it’ll be sufficient to stick with this structure. For the blog we will need to be more careful though.

The Blog
As said before, we will use the Story/Page content type for the blog, which is the central component of the website. We will structure the stories/posts using the CMS standards: Categories in Wordpress and Taxonomy in Drupal.
The reason why is because the blog can be seen as one component with lots of new information being published on a regular base. Suppose you have written this great photography post about landscape compositions a couple of months ago, but your readers need to scroll through every post about cameras and aperture settings, chances are that they’ll leave your website before they found your article.
Another thing that needs to be reconsidered is that posts/stories can be linked to different categories. This is a good and a bad thing. The good thing is when writing a post, you don’t have to be thinking all the time about sticking to your subject. The bad thing is that people are likely to link their posts to as much categories as possible.
Let me give you some examples:
1. You’re writing a post about a nice landscape you’ve seen, and you describe why the composition was that perfect and what settings you’ve used on your camera to make that superb picture.
This story can be categorized in photography/technical and photography/composition.

2. You’re writing a travel story about your last trip, and at a certain moment you describe a landscape that seemed to have a perfect composition for a picture and why it seemed like that.
You classify this story under travel/story but not under photography/composition.

In the second example, why don’t we classify the story under photography/composition?
When a visitor requests an overview of all photography posts about composition, your travel story will appear in that list. This is not the information he/she is looking for. The visitor wants tips or information on composition, and is not interested to read how you’ve spent your time in Oegadoega. If you really think that the info about composition that you’re giving in your travel story is that important for photographers, you need to consider to write a separate post for it.

Now let us get back to the techniques. My blog will have four main categories: Travel, Writing, Web development and Photography. These will be the top nodes of the tree structure.
In Drupal:
Go to Administer > Content management > Taxonomy and press the tab Add vocabulary.
We add four new vocabularies for each of our main categories. Check the content type story and check the setting multiple select .
In Wordpress:
Go to Posts > categories and create four new categories.

The next step is to define the different levels in which you will divide your main categories (or vocabularies if you like).
Here’s how I’ll structure my content:

Travel
      Stories

Photography
      Technical
      Cameras & accessories
      Composition
      Pictures
            Travel
            People
            Projects

Writing
      Blogging
      Articles

Web design
      Code
      CMS

Now I know what you’re thinking… first I’m telling you that you need to think this over and over and that you need to have several subcategories of subcategories, but my structure only has three levels, most of the time only two.
And you’re right! This is only a first draft of my structure. At this stage I’ve spent most of my time learning the different CMS that I didn’t really think about the final structure yet. But I promise, when I’ve figured things out, I’ll certainly post them!

Before I show you how to create this structure in Drupal and Wordpress, you need to know that there’s a huge difference between the two. In my humble opinion, I think this is a huge shortcoming of Drupal but I guess the designers had their reasons (probably because taxonomy can be used for every content type in Drupal).
Suppose, you’ve created the category “Writing” in Wordpress with the subcategories “Blogging” and “Articles”. And now you want to write a post about the writing style of a book you’ve read. This doesn’t belong to Blogging or Articles, and as you’re probably not going to write fifty posts about this subject, you can just categorize it under the main category “Writing”.
This is something that’s not possible in Drupal. You can’t categorize a post under a vocabulary, only under a certain term in a vocabulary.
There are two possibilities to solve this issue:
1. For each (sub)category where you expect that there might be post which don’t fit in any subcategory, you can create a new subcategory called “other” or “random” or something like that.
e.g.
Writing
      Blogging
      Articles
      Other
2. You start your vocabulary at a higher level.
e.g.
Blog
      Writing
            Blogging
            Articles
      Photography
      …
Both solutions have their pros and cons. The first solution looks very amateurish to me, it looks like you don’t really know what you’re doing (which might be the case, just don’t tell anyone).
The second solution may resolve in the fact that visitors won’t find your articles as they tend to look on the lowest level possible (so only in Blogging and Articles, but not in Writing).
It’s up to you!

Now how do we create these subcategories?
In Drupal:
Go to Administer > Content management > Taxonomy and press the add terms function next to your vocabulary. Enter the name of the term. For the first level this is sufficient, for any other levels, go to Advanced options and select the parent (higher level) category.
In Wordpress:
Go to Posts > categories, enter the name of the category and select the parent (higher level) category.

And there you go. Your content is now structured.

I’ve mentioned this a lot before (I know), but again, think before you start structuring your content. Otherwise you may find yourself one day in a huge mess, needing a lot of time restructuring it all.
Last days I’ve quite heavily investigated in this issue, and I still haven’t figured out some kind of ideal strategy.
If you have one, please share it with us!

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