When I was at university, I was one of a somewhat rare group who enjoyed structuralist critical theory. In a nutshell, this states that since all literature is made up of components of grammar (phonemes, adjectives, syntax, etc.) you can describe any text according to this grammar. At its most basic a narrative is state X → event Y → state Z which is different to state X.

Perhaps this is why content management appeals to me. There’s a set of paradigms (content types) that can be described through adjectives (metadata). There are verbs (workflow) and syntax (navigation), and content can be represented in different declensions (templates). But what the content management system is expressing is different each time. The content is the language, while the CMS is the grammar.

So an FAQ has similar composition whether it’s aimed at specialist user communities or the general public; a press release has the same structure whether it’s displayed in English or in French; content can have different “skins” depending on the person viewing the page. When implementing your content, I really don’t care what the content contains, just how people are going to produce and consume it.

A key point to remember about grammar however is that it evolves. Common usage changes the rules. How many supermarkets state “10 items or less” rather than the correct “10 items or fewer”? And how many people know the difference?

So you have to be aware that your requirements will change and the grammatical model for your CMS may need to evolve. If you pick a model with more complex content management processes — component-based systems like Tridion or Percussion say — you may find your users struggling initially. But if you pick simple page-based tools like EpiServer, your contributors may not be able to express themselves in the way they want, such as creating more complex content relationships.

So when picking a CMS technology, you need to think about the complexity of your content management tasks, the processes and structure you’ll want to exploit. Does the system speak your language? Try a few phrases and see. Get the suppliers to show you how you would achieve key tasks around content creation, publication and relationships and pick the language that isn’t double-Dutch.