Issue 20

No doubt you’ve had an experience working in something like Microsoft Word or Google Docs, and you’ve had no formal connection to the company style guide. Maybe you knew the content you created would be useful to an audience but you didn’t know how to—or who could—publish the content where the intended audience could use it.

These scenarios are essentially content operations issues. More specifically, they are governance concerns.

Often there is someone in the organization who cares about the style guide or who publishes content, but they often don’t know how—or don’t have the access needed—to formalize these issues in the content tooling. As a result, there’s a reliance on humans to know and follow the style guide or who can do what to content.

I talk a lot about the four roles or practices in content: content strategy, content design, content operations, and content engineering. While I cherish the opportunity for practitioners to specialize in any of those four practices, I love to point out that naturally there’s some fuzziness, because the practices all have some overlap.

In my mind, I think it’s useful to point out when multiple practices come together. This is where content roles get tricky, and visualizing the overlap helps give a framework to work through different viewpoints.

For the scenarios of trying to formalize a style guide or who can publish content in the content tooling itself, we’ve got one of those overlap scenarios. Specifically, we have an overlap between the content operations practice and the content engineering practice.

Decisions made in the content model can have implications for content operations. And the reverse is true: Content operations needs may require content modeling.

Sometimes, the content types themselves or their relationship with each other will affect content operations, but many times, the content operations are formalized via field-level validations.

Style guide

Some content management system (CMS) vendors have field-level validations that include the ability to match or prohibit certain patterns using what are known as Regular Expressions (RegEx). You could potentially enforce title conventions using this approach. For example, you might have a style to avoid gerunds in titles.

Here’s how this looks in the content model validation configuration in Contentful.

Caveat 1: There’s a lot of English-language quirks that make it hard to create the perfect RegEx, especially for something like the gerunds example. This is more an example than a recommendation.

Caveat 2: You would not be able to address all style guide issues via this method, especially in long text fields.

Roles

Depending on your CMS, you can give roles and permissions to specific user groups or user roles, based on specific content types, and sometimes even at the field level within a content type.

For instance, you might have a content type of “product specifications” and a content type of “product description” where there are two user groups with the author role. The user group of product manager could create, edit, and publish product specifications but not product descriptions, and the user group product marketer could create, edit, and publish product descriptions and not product specifications.

Other ways to formalize content ops via your content model

Those are just a few examples, but there are plenty of other ways your content model enforces content operations.

• Require certain fields and leave other fields as optional.
• Require fields to be unique (either within the same content type or across all content types, depending on CMS vendor).
• Enforce character count limits (minimum or maximum). (Note: This is risky when dealing with localized content, because many translations are longer than English, but Asian languages may use a single character in place of multiple English characters.)
• Match a specific pattern. We mentioned this before, but it’s worth calling out that if used for common formats like email, phone, or URL, it’s an easy way to let the CMS take care of making sure the format is valid.
• Specify appropriate file types for media. This may depend on the CMS vendor for specifics, but if you want a field to be an image and not audio or video, you should be able to do that in most CMS tools that use validations.
• Establish how many and what type of content types a reference field refers to. In Issue 19, I used the example of a “Book” content type with a reference field to an “Author” content type. Using validations, you can allow a book to have multiple author references to reflect the reality that sometimes more than one person authors a book. You can also specify that the author reference field only allows “Author” content types and not “Publisher” or “Reviewer” or “Author headshot” content types.
• For rich text field types, specify allowable formatting, such as Heading 1, bulleted list, numbered list, block quotes, and so on.
• For rich text field types (depending on vendor), allow or prohibit links (and how many) to URLs, CMS entries, or media assets.
• For rich text field types (depending on vendor), allow or prohibit embedded entries or assets (and how many) within the field. For instance, if you have a “Company name” or “Product name” content type, you might embed that within a body field to enable easier rebrands that inevitably come.

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Never forget

Yesterday was the 24th anniversary of the September 11 attacks that killed 2,977 people.

Among the dead were an unprecedented number of first responders who made the ultimate sacrifice:

• 343 firefighters of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY)
• 37 officers of the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD)
• 23 officers of the New York City Police Department (NYPD)
• 8 EMTs/paramedics from private ambulance services
• 4 members of the New York State Office of Tax Enforcement
• 3 officers of the New York State Office of Court Administration
• 1 member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
• 1 member of the New York Fire Patrol
• 1 member of the United States Secret Service

In the 24 years since the attacks, far more first responders have died from 9/11-related illnesses than from the attacks themselves. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum lists 44,000 first responders and survivors as having cancer from the World Trade Center collapse.

As of 2020, 247 NYPD officers had died of 9/11-related illnesses. The FDNY reported its 343rd 9/11 illness fatality on Sept. 25, 2023, matching the number it lost in the attack. Both departments expect more deaths in years to come.

First responders from around the country were also deployed to Ground Zero to help with recovery, and some of them have also died of 9/11-related illnesses.

As an eyewitness to the World Trade Center tragedy, who subsequently became a volunteer firefighter/EMT, I will never forget the loss, the sacrifice, and the heroism of that day.

John Collins

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