James Robertson: Where is the knowledge in a CMS?

Interestingly, the knowledge is not in the content itself. Instead, it’s in the processes and practices that surround a content management system.

This article puts forth the idea that the configuration and design for a content management system deployment contains valuable knowledge, more so than the raw content that is loaded into it. In order to deploy a complex system like this you have to learn about how your organization operates, what it is trying to achieve, and collaborate to develop a solution to support those efforts. Very valuable knowledge that should be preserved.

The lesson I take away from this: document your CMS deployment processes and research and archive it for reading later by those who follow you (or yourself five years later). You need to capture the ‘why’s of how you designed things since they may not be obvious to someone maintaining or updating the system who was not involved in the original project. A project blog would do this nicely.