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Creation

Adding Content

Some of the key challenges facing an organization are enabling a large number of contributors to add knowledge to the system, and to do so quickly and simply. Some content management suites rely on third party software for this purpose. While there are clear advantages in certain cases from using popular office applications, these do not give the user an accurate feel of how the content will appear in context. Specialist HTML design tools on the other hand are not mainly geared to content entry, and present a steeper learning curve for the non-technical user.

Immediacy Editor provides an ideal solution, offering office style content entry directly into a WYSIWYG editing screen. Users familiar with normal Office applications will immediately feel at home with the screen layout and tool bars offered. Images, tables, rules, lists, links, bookmarks and other elements are all quickly and intuitively inserted, and formatted. This content is created directly as HTML. When the page is saved the content is validated and converted to XML/XHTML. This allows it to be re-purposed for another platform.

In addition to direct entry, Immediacy Editor provides flexible import facilities. It is possible to paste directly from Word or Excel and other document sources, into the program. During the paste process intelligent re-formatting removes unwanted code and converts the document to the correct departmental style. It is also possible to import or drag and drop Office 2003 documents directly into the editor. This allows the extremely rapid creation of fully formatted web pages from standard office documents. Alternatively these documents can be linked into the site.

To ensure a consistent look and feel across the site, Immediacy Editor uses style sheets during editing. These are defined in advance for a corporate or departmental style. Style sheets may be created and edited in Immediacy Designer or in any other suitable editing tool. The program supports multiple style sheets, and different style sheets may be used for different parts of the site or for different sites within an organisation. Given appropriate user permissions, changing between one style sheet and another requires no more than a simple selection from a list. Selecting a different style sheet potentially changes the look and feel of that page significantly. This can include the background, the choice of fonts, type, sizes, colour and a whole host of pre-set features that form part of style sheet capabilities.

Subject to permission settings, a user can also change the template for a page. Changing the template allows for a much more radical change of output, which together with XML based content storage, enables re-purposing of content. A template contains default content and visual design elements for a page or a section of the site, and includes defined areas that the user can edit. If templates are designed with common editable areas a page may be switched from one template to another with no loss of content. The page is completely re-assembled into the new template elements.

Adding Content Properties

In addition to creating and adding content, a vital part of content management, and a feature that separates it from simple page creation, is the ability to add Meta data and attributes. These may be used to provide personalised information to a user, to refine searches, for indexing, cataloguing and so on.

Immediacy Editor supports creation and editing of a wide set of attributes. Certain attributes, including version number, author and date last updated, are generated automatically as the software is used. Other properties provided as standard include, keywords, description, title, page live date, page expiry date, end user access rights (i.e. page access controlled by user log-on), show or hide the page in the menu, mark a page as subscribe-able, mark a page change as newsworthy, add a page to latest news, and add a page to site headlines. These properties give great flexibility in page use and deployment.

The ability to modify content properties is common to both editors and administrators. In many cases editors are most likely to know the specific details of the properties and attributes that are relevant to a particular piece of content. At other times these values require an administrator's input. Both content and property changes need to be approved by an authorised approver before being made live.