Osiris:
A Conceptual Overview
Lead Developer, Enterity
Disclaimer
This is a conceptual introduction, not a technical document. Which means we will avoid dropping hints about the guts of the system, or waxing nostalgic about the standards, techniques and theories that provided initial inspiration for building Osiris the way we did.
It also means that this is not a tutorial. But we hope it will grant you the understanding needed to be more effective when you do have a specific task to accomplish.
This article exists because we have found that the organizing principles that drive Osiris aren't immediately obvious to our clients, whose primary use for it is managing web sites. These principles have been developed with a broader context in mind than the Web, and gives Osiris the great flexibility that allows it to grow with you as your needs change and develop.
Managing content, not pages
Osiris is generally classified as a Content Management System. It's telling that it is not called a Page Management System. What we're concerned about is managing content. Which is good. Content is what you want to deliver to your audience in the first place. The web (and pages therein) are merely a highly convenient way to convey it. So let's forget about pages for now, and even the Internet.
Once we leave behind the form it takes to reach your readers, we can start thinking about what content is for. In providing it to your audience, your aim is to communicate ideas or describe phenomenon or things. In these capacities content is often structured — sometimes loosely, sometimes rigorously. Consider the following:
- A news article can have a title, a date, a by-line, body text, and maybe a summary.
- In describing an event you'll need to let the reader know time and place, what is happening and if it costs anything to attend.
- If you're describing a product, you may have to indicate color, size, price, and whether or not batteries are included.
This is how Osiris thinks about content. The administrative tools allow for the creation, editing, organization and deletion of units of structured content. All of these units are collectively referred to as resources, and Osiris will handle few or many resource types. When you create or edit resources, the forms you use to enter information reflect the structure of the type of content you're working with.
How does this relate to what the readers see?
We noted earlier that the Internet was merely a way to convey the content you wished to deliver. So is paper. So is word of mouth, or television or radio. So a page on a web site, built on Osiris, is just a view of the resource you created. The page will likely have other components on it (menus to navigate to other parts of the site, links to related items of interest, etc), but the resource the page represents is its raison d'être.
Organizing content
If you only had one resource to present to your audience, you'd be done. And we'd be out of a job. Organizing content is probably the most challenging part of communicating effectively to your audience. This is because it is also the most powerful tool you have.
Organizing resources is all about figuring out how they relate to each other. Ideally, the more accurate you can be in identifying the relationships between resources, the easier it will be for your audience to find what they're looking for. Issues of visual presentation come into play as well, but the best graphic design in the world cannot fix a poorly organized set of resources.
We often think of sites as trees of information. This is in large part because in the past most sites were based on the directory structure in a file system, much as you would find in organizing files on your own computer. Still, it is not a bad structure for certain types of content. Specifically, it works well where site information is organized by increasing levels of detail. It is also how nearly all of your audience will expect your site to be organized.
Moving beyond trees.
Where trees fail to adequately describe the organization of your content is when we stop thinking of everything as a page. A Broadway show may have many performances, but it isn't really accurate to say that those performances are 'children' of the show. Further afield, if you wish to describe different products in your database as being similar to each other, that is definitely not a parent-child relationship. Trees also require that resources only live in one spot. A resource can only have one parent.
It should be no suprise to anyone that hyperlinks are the escape hatch in a tree-based system. With anything only a link away, you can climb out of your tree any time you wish. But simply cross-linking resources in the body text of a page leaves Osiris out of the loop. Which is a shame, really, because using the administrative tools to describe these relationships lets you ask Osiris interesting questions later:
- what are the most popular products that are similar to the one I'm currently looking at?
- what performances of this show aren't sold out yet?
- what news items have we published that are related to this topic?
In Osiris, describing a type of content includes specifying what other resources it can be related to, and in what way. These relationships are then used to build the various menus, side-bars and other extras that appear when the resource is rendered as a web page. Those extra features on a page are the automatically generated answers to the questions Osiris can answer for you when you keep it in-the-know.
Bringing it all together
Most of Osiris' job is to help you build and organize your content. Exactly how that content appears to your audience is generally decided when the visual design of the site is done. When our designers create the look of your site, they design with this relationship-based, structured-content approach in mind. Which leaves you, the owner and maintainer of the site, to worry about what is most important — creating, polishing, and organizing your content.
Abstracting your content away from it's visual presentation is a powerful way to focus on the substance of your information. Stripped of its trimmings, bells and whistles, it becomes much clearer that the content will or won't stand on its own merits. It is also easier to see how it might relate to other content you've already created.
There's no magic in this. It's simply a matter of avoiding distraction. With a page-based mentality, its tempting to create resources that "fill out the design" rather than giving the content its proper due. With a structure-based approach, Osiris puts content center stage, leaving design in the supporting role where it belongs. This means not only can you focus on your content without distractions, but you leave open the possibility that your data can be easily adapted to new media, including whatever form the web takes as time goes on.