April 24, 2007

One Problem with Template-Generated Content

April 24, 2007, 11:32 PM | 1 Comment

Content Management Systems (CMS’s) are great. The power and flexibility they offer website owners make them an invaluable piece to any “modern” site. Every now and then though, CMS’s can show their weaknesses. Whether it be limiting the front end of a site because of what the CMS can or cannot do (which should never happen, but it does) or it just makes it too darn easy to publish some content, CMS’s have some drawbacks.

Last night after the Toronto Blue Jays won their game against the Boston Red Sox, I decided to look up the game recap over at ESPN.com. First let me say that I’m a real fan of ESPN.com and all they’re doing in terms pushing the envelope when it comes to content-delivery on the web. The innovations they’ve put in place over the past 5 years have been incredible. Having said that, they really need to get better when it comes to the editing/content approval department.

What I came across was a tiny little thing, but it’s one that I thought points out a bit of an issue with template-generated content, a feature of many enterprise content management systems. I took a screenshot of the little mis-hap because I knew that eventually ESPN’s editors would catch up, and sure enough when I looked at the same recap about an hour and a half later, the sentence in question had been removed.

In case you can’t see the screenshot I took, the part I’m talking about reads like this:

“Elias Says: (if applicable to the game) A teaser sentence can be written here to get the reader to click on hyper-linked Elias at start of this entry. –>”

Obviously, in the scope of “whoopsies” on the Internet, this is a very minor publishing mistake, but given a different set of circumstances (and probably on a different site altogether) this type of mistake could be very damaging. Again, it displays a fairly common drawback to the ease of publishing that CMS’s give content publishers.

I don’t want to rag on ESPN, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen something like this slip out—usually it’s just spelling or grammer errors though. The question I keep wondering about though is whether or not content management systems have made it too easy for these types of mistakes to go completely unnoticed?

Is there something we as web professionals can do to make sure this type of slip up doesn’t happen to our clients? Or does this come down to a strictly internal lack of attention to detail? Thoughts?

Posted in: Technology, Web Development