pTools – content assembly and content management

We talk about the pTools content element model and to be fair it’s not that easy to understand. But it’s at the heart of what pTools does. So I’ve decided we should call it what it is, which is really ‘content assembly’ and I hope that makes more sense.

So what’s content assembly then? Well it’s simple, pTools assembles content and published it to pages. But the trick is to assemble that content dynamically. By that I mean in a way that allows pieces of content – elements – to be assembled and re-assembled, used and re-used many many times. For different pages, without ever changing the original piece of content. That’s the trick. Publishing a piece of content to one page is fine, it’s what most CMS users want to do quickly and easily and pTools lets you focus on that task.

But what if you want to see that same piece of content on different pages? And you don’t want to spend your time accessing and editing those pages. That’s where dynamic content assembly comes in. Let’s say you have a new piece of content to put up about a new product or service your company is launching. Of course you want to publish it to the ‘new services’ section. But you might also want to see it in the ‘what’s new’ section and listed in the’ latest additions’ links on the home page and shown in a whole range of different service category pages. You may want to see it on the corporate website and a website dedicated to a specific market or to a specific customer or member of your site.

In the end this piece of content may be available in dozens of locations in different formats and the last thing you need to be doing is managing each of these different instances. Trying to do that is hugely time consuming and impossible to manage. You want one instance of that piece of content, you want to manage it effectively and you want the system to handle the multiple deliveries to different pages automatically.

You want the CMS to manage all that assembly. Content assembly and content management.