Gadgetopia

COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere : Here’s an interesting article from NPR on what they call COPE – Create Once, Publish Everywhere.

COPE is the key difference between content management systems and web publishing tools, although these terms are often used interchangeably in our industry. The goal of any CMS should be to gather enough information to present the content on any platform, in any presentation, at any time.

What they’re talking about is storing content in such a way that the final presentation layer is unimportant.  In fact, they differentiate their “CMS” from what they call “WPT” — “Web Publishing Tools.”

This is important – page through the SlideShare presentation on the page.  In it, they show the editing interface where they put together the story, and they show all the different forms which came out of it, from Web to iPhone.  Great examples of presentation-free content management.

In reading this, I was really stuck how similar it is to the post I made this spring called Beyond Web Centricity in Content Management.  I said:

[…] sometimes we (as Web developers) get too caught up in the “Web” part. Sometimes we get very Web-centric about our content, when we really should be looking at content from a completely presentation-free perspective.

The NPR article includes an extensive graphic explaining their different layers of their storage system and where items are cached along the pipeline.