What is a component content management system (CCMS)?

Any business can find it challenging to manage all of the content requirements for a multichannel world. Having the right content management system (CMS), such as a Component Content Management System (CCMS), can help organizations publish content to multiple locations, improve collaboration, and create a single source of truth for all content assets.

Not every CMS on the market has the capabilities to work as a CCMS, and this article highlights key differences between content solutions that support a component-based versus page-based approach.

#What is a Component Content Management System (CCMS)?

A Component Content Management System is a CMS that enables teams to build modular, reusable content models that can be used to quickly build new pages or content types.

With a CCMS, instead of using full-page templates, you break content into granular blocks of structure that are reused throughout the site. For example, a component could be a header banner, a call to action (CTA) button, an image carousel, product details, a table, or even a simple paragraph.

Some use cases where CCMS is particularly effective include user guides, technical documentation, training materials, and knowledge bases.

#CCMS vs page builder CMS

A CCMS takes a highly structured approach to organizing content data, making it possible to break up content pages into modular components. So, instead of building new content models for each page type, teams can build bite-sized component blocks that can be put together to form any number of content pages.

This modular content structure helps teams to future-proof their content strategies. As needs change over time, the content team can quickly build new and unique pages by repurposing existing components. With the same components reused across the site, teams can roll out updates more efficiently because they can make changes in a central place and have the update appear everywhere the component is used.

With a page builder CMS, teams build content as a full page. This “entire-document” approach to content creation generally makes it easy to set up and get started with a page builder CMS. They can be a good choice for simple marketing sites that only use a few page types and aren’t reliant on large amounts of data.

However, a page builder lacks the content structure to reuse and repurpose site elements. Every page type needs its own template, and updates must be made to each page. As teams scale up content production, this can lead to a lot of data duplication and copy-and-pasting that makes it hard to keep content consistent across the site.

#Component vs. document approaches

A CCMS uses a component-based approach to content modeling, where teams consider content a collection of modular elements. A page builder CMS uses an entire-document approach, where teams think of content in terms of full pages.

With an entire-document approach, for example, the product page would be a single model and content that is entered is tied to a particular page and becomes single-use. Whereas with a component-based approach, the product page would be made of components like CTAs, product attributes, unique selling points (USPs), or use cases and the content that’s entered is structured so that it can be used in different ways throughout the site, like in personalized recommendations or on marketing landing pages.

Component-based content management helps teams to work more efficiently, create reusable content, deliver content to multiple frontends, and ensure information is consistent across the entire project. While it may take time to adjust to a more modular approach, it ultimately gives content teams more independence and empowers them to be more creative with how information is conveyed.

#What does a CCMS enable?

Content reuse

With a more modular approach to content, teams can populate pages with content that should be consistent across the site while having a single entry to update.

If a team wants to test a new CTA version across the site, for example, they don’t have to remember where the CTA is used. They can update it in a single place and reflect those changes sitewide. This significantly improves the content team’s workflow and helps build better brand consistency.

Content enrichment

As more elements of the site become reusable, teams have more time to enrich new pages with existing content and, in general, spend more time creating quality content.

When creating new content, teams can pull from existing elements rather than starting from scratch, which allows them to focus on the new and more engaging parts. This helps teams balance creating high-quality content and avoiding having a lot of single-use content that is hard to scale.

Components also make building more personalization into the customer experience easier, as adapting specific components can create a memorable experience without creating cumbersome workflows.

Easy localization and internationalization

Making it easier to keep content consistent across the site also makes the translation and localization process shorter and more concise. Instead of updating similar content repeatedly, teams can ensure that the content gets localized quickly and efficiently.

With a modular approach, teams can also prioritize the most important components to localize first with more granular control over what components can be global and which should be changed for different locals.

Omnichannel publishing

Traditional page builder CMSs model content with desktop in mind, which doesn’t reflect today’s omnichannel consumers.

A CCMS has to give content data a structure in order to break it down into modular components. This structured approach also makes it easier to adapt content to different displays if teams want a component to look different on a mobile site compared to a desktop site, that can be done in the frontend design without changing the underlying data structure, allowing the same content data to be reused on different channels with different displays.

Using the same components across devices and channels, teams can ensure that the messaging remains consistent and reduce the manual work needed to manage multiple frontends.

Centralized control

With highly structured content data, it’s easier to combine content data from different business systems and create a single source of truth. Rather than storing duplicate content in multiple locations, content teams know that they have all of the relevant information in a single space without having to copy-and-paste between multiple systems or from existing content pages.

Content teams can quickly build new pages with the flexible component models and easily enrich these pages with data from multiple systems. This allows teams to launch new content more efficiently, make updates more easily, and keep content consistent throughout the site.

#Who can benefit from a CCMS?

A CCMS provides numerous benefits for organizations that have outgrown the capabilities of a traditional CMS.

Organizations with a complex internal knowledge base

Organizations with complex knowledge bases, like internal or external web portals, can easily find themselves in a situation where content data is housed in multiple systems that are not easily accessible to the broader team. With a CCMS, teams can have a single place to access all their content with the flexibility to use that data in a wide range of use cases.

Organizations with multiple frontends

Teams working with multiple frontends that wish to pull from a single source of truth can greatly benefit from a component-based approach to content management. Teams can pull just the data they need for the particular frontend, which may vary wildly. Keeping all of the content within a CCMS helps ensure that each channel's content stays up-to-date and relevant.

Organizations with large amounts of structured data

Teams working with a large amount of structured data will find CCMS to be a natural fit. Whether teams are using a CCMS to manually manage all of the content or if the content is being federated into the CCMS, teams have a lot of flexibility in how they structure content data and optimize workflows when using a CCMS.

#Advantages of CCMS

Key advantages that a CCMS offers when compared to a page builder CMS.

Better consistency and accuracy

Teams can build a single, data-rich content repository where they can manage their content across channels. Instead of updating content in multiple systems, teams can manage their content in one central place. With content broken down into modular elements, updating site elements takes seconds rather than minutes or hours. This ensures that messaging stays consistent across the site and devices.

Content reuse

A CCMS lets teams reuse structural components and content assets to build new, unique pages quickly. Teams don’t have to waste time rebuilding common elements, so they can focus more time and energy on creating new, engaging content.

Reduced maintenance cost

Teams no longer need to copy and paste information between multiple systems or different pages, allowing teams to cut down on maintenance costs. CCMS helps keep content well organized and easy to find, rather than becoming unusable or forgotten in a separate system.

Multichannel publishing

The highly structured way a CCMS handles content data makes it easier to adapt content to the different formats needed for different channels. Many CCMSs have a headless architecture, which means that backend data is structured independently of frontend design, so the same content can be displayed in different ways across different frontend channels (the “heads”).

Traceability

With a CCMS, it’s easier to know where content is coming from and what must be done to update it. Using a core set of components, managed in a central location, helps teams better track the data sources, change history, and channel locations of each piece of content.

Scalability

A CCMS can boost teams' productivity and allow them to expand their content strategy by making it easy to reuse elements across channels and push out global updates all at once. The granular control of a components-based approach also lets teams efficiently meet the unique needs of different channels, allowing them to quickly scale the brand experience into new markets, locales, and touchpoints.

#How Hygraph enables component management

Hygraph is a CCMS with a headless architecture that empowers organizations to easily create, manage, and deliver complex content at scale. It provides very flexible content modeling to build high-performing, content-driven applications with any frontend technology.

Hygraph lets both developers and content creators work autonomously and take full advantage of a component-based approach. With an API-first design for efficient development and a user-friendly interface, Hygraph Studio, for non-technical users. This easy-to-use system has allowed Komax to add new elements to the website at 3 times their previous speed and helped them raise their Site Performance score from 74 to 99. Developers can now integrate new requirements into the website quickly. Content editors have a series of components to use including banners, buttons, quote boxes, and download cards that allow them to quickly spin up new pages without developer help.

Hygraph’s GraphQL API provides a high level of flexibility when structuring and querying content and makes it possible to federate all your remote data sources to create a single source of truth for content. This flexibility allows Stobag to manage their B2B customer portal, B2C marketing site, and product information database all from the same CMS. Helping them transition from a print-based to digital approach, and take online revenue from 15% of the total business share to 70%.

Thousands of global digital teams (including Samsung, Telenor, Epic Games, and 2U) monetize their content by powering mission-critical applications with Hygraph. If you’d like to learn how Hygraph can accelerate your digital content strategy, we’re happy to have a chat.