Make your model channel and platform independent

Boris Pocatko

3 minutes

0% complete

Each channel and platform has its own characteristics. For example, the web uses HTML whereas smart speakers use voice. Similarly, we'd love you to stick with Kontent.ai, but you never know. The holy grail of a future-proof content model is for it to be platform-independent.

Channel independence

The number of channels you want to serve is usually equal to the number of different front end languages. And the number of channels will only grow with time, so the only way to solve this is to craft channel-independent content. Most of the other techniques, such as the ones described in adaptability and maintainability, will help you with channel independence as well. Besides that, make sure you don't embed channel specifics deep into the model. These could be channel-specific elements, such as Twitter summary elements. If you do, keep them as separate as possible, so it's easy to adjust or remove them if needed. Adaptability will greatly help with channel independence as content created that way is relatively easy to repurpose to fit different channel front ends. Ideally, don't include layouts in your content model at all. Often we see pages being modeled according to proposed designs and sometimes content is even directly placed into these content items representing pages. If editors would like to influence the look and feel of the pages, discuss the level they feel comfortable with. A full WYSIWYG

experience will lock you into a channel, layout, and even vendor. There are several alternatives to how editors can influence the layout without the need to actually design layouts and templates in the CMS. For example:

Drive the layout via taxonomies and render layouts, for example, based on the playful or strict voice and tone of the text.
Write extensive guidelines with screenshots explaining how elements behave and how they'll display, for example.
Have setting switches (implemented via taxonomies or multiple choice elements) on content items or elements, which will specify the behavior or appearance such as alignment, pop-up behavior, link handling, and so on.
If you're using content types representing layouts or templates, don't embed content directly into them but use linked elements to connect existing or new content separated from the actual form.
Existing text styles, combined with the taxonomy (settings) based approach, allows you to modify and reuse text styles such as headings, bold, or italics to drive different front-end experiences, for example, italics and playful settings will change the font and background color as described in the guidelines.

Platform independence

The toolset of each platform will differ greatly and most vendors, knowingly or unknowingly, will lock you in with their specific tooling. This will make platform moves time-consuming, difficult, expensive, and in some cases even impossible as you might be too invested in the given vendor stack.There is vendor-specific tooling, but the basic techniques and concepts should be available in most of these tools, such as the concept of linking content items. If you adhere to the techniques outlined in this course and don't lean too much onto the tools locking you in with a specific vendor, platform independence can be achieved as well.Try to keep the content model of the actual content and the front-end presentation as independent as possible.

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