A Content Operating System (COS) takes a composable, modular approach to content authoring and management. Rather than editing content for a single channel like one website, it treats content as data, modularising it for use across all channels and mediums.
This data can then be used on websites, apps, dashboards, IoT devices, TV news overlays, and more. Content such as Authors, Partners, Statistics, News Posts, Testimonials and more can be re-purposed across all these mediums.
This will sound similar to a headless CMS, but the operating system aspect takes it above and beyond by providing a suite of tools for content authoring, editing, and management—a full operating system for your content.
What features must my COS have?
The CMS
The backbone of a COS is a feature-rich and flexible CMS. The past half a decade has shown rapid improvement in this area, and the list of table stakes is longer than it’s ever been.
Live, Real-time Previews
When creating and editing content, you must be able to see exactly how that content will look like when viewed across all mediums. Research shows one of the most frustrating problems when using a CMS is when the output doesn’t look how you expect when publishing, making it guesswork to change or create content. This preview must update in real-time, which will save your team endless hours they would otherwise spend waiting for it to refresh.
Click-to-edit
It can be a pain to try and find content in your CMS, particularly as it grows larger. With click-to-edit, you can just click on any content on your live website and be taken straight to it immediately to edit it. You can then navigate your website from within the CMS, visually editing it.
Multiplayer Editing
Locked documents should be a thing of the past. Users should be able to edit the same document together, in real-time. Presence indicators should show what exact line each user is on, and keystrokes should be shown to all users in real-time.
Content Scheduling
A content schedule can help keep you and your team organised. Automatically publishing content to a schedule can ensure you’re ahead of the game and planning in release cycles across mediums for maximum impact.
Media Management
The ability to upload media, tag for context, then filter and select for use is massively important for a rich content experience.
Full Revision History and Restore
Things go wrong, mistakes are made. The ability to effortlessly recover should be a given.
Global and Per-page SEO
Optimising your content is almost as important as writing it. SEO tools should give you confidence over how it appears in search and socials, and control to optimise for your audience. Pre-flight checks can ensure its in great shape before publishing, like ensuring no deadlinks are on the page.
Redirects
The ability to manage different types of redirects is paramount to your web and marketing teams. Having this deeply integrated with your editing tools ensures no article change ends in a dead link for your users again.
Header and Footer Menu Management
Your site IA and nav menus should have the ability to change. Your structure may feel fairly set in stone when you first launch, but you’ll soon be wanting to add, edit and remove items from your menus. Ensuring you have that flexibility is key.
If you’re missing any of these features, you should seriously consider changing your CMS, or you’ll be wasting time and stress writing and editing content without the time-saving tools your competitors are using.
Writing Content in the COS
Where you write and edit content should be distraction-free, with tools for quickly laying out that content in a visual way. Initial drafts of content should be quick to create, multiplayer by default, and easy to edit and refine.
It can be easier to write draft content upfront without having to think about how it will be laid out on the page or what visuals to use. Your COS should give you this distraction-free, stripped back editor for draft content, while still ensuring all the rich editing helpers are integrated here too. Sanity provides a tool called Sanity Create for exactly that.
The COS should also provide features to improve the holistic content process, not just the management of it.
For example, Sanity’s COS can store context about your organisation, and pull these pieces of context into your editor to help you write, fact check, or give you a head start on your next article.
These pieces of context could be product or material information, news, organisation data, information about your team members, and any bite sized information.
Sanity’s COS also integrates with AI, utilising this context to help you write rich, factual content, saving you masses of time when writing prompts.
Hex are Sanity specialists, crafting DXPs tailored to the unique needs of our clients while delivering exceptional digital experiences. As certified partners of leading platforms like Sanity, Vercel, and Mixpanel, we have the expertise to bring your vision to life. Contact us to discover how a Sanity Content Operating System (COS) could transform your digital strategy.