Way back in 1996, before a line of code was written, Mediasurface published a "model" for content management. This described, in a nutshell, what content management was about. It said that the four key players in the game, which we called "who, what, where and how," were:

• the user ("who"), the wider community of people who take part in all stages of the content lifecycle from production through to consumption.
• the content ("what"), at a granular level below that of the page to allow it to be independent of presentation and encourage re-use across many digital channels
• the structure ("where"), how individual pieces of content are related to other content in hierarchical and peer-to-peer relationships that define how users find the content
• the views on content ("how"), the way everyone in the content lifecycle - producer and consumer - sees the content for their purpose on their channel

Together, these four parts of the model combine to say some important things about the facilities we then put in our content management application. The core principles of this model are as true today as they were ten years ago.