Introduction to Digital Publishing
Publishing online can get complicated.
Socially, politically, technologically and logistically, just getting our work online is a challenge, let alone noticed. It takes a strong plan to make content, get it online smoothly, ensure its relevance, and keep everything up-to-date. The Content Construction Kit (CCK) is a key part of that plan.
Structured content is the basic idea that makes the CCK important for publishing. Structured content is writing in such a way that little "chunks" of information can be pulled from your documents and easily reused online. This is a fundamental shift from the locked-in metaphor of words on paper.
The CCK represents a different publishing paradigm than what you may be used to. That's ok. We have lots of tools and tutorials to help.
The technical foundations of our publishing ecosystem are simple, yet powerful, standard systems for managing "chunks." Basically, the CCK helps organize stories for publishing online. It works by providing a baseline templates (what we call a schema) for creating metadata (that's data about data) and content (words, pictures, etc) that our editors, publishers, and the content management system can quickly and easily spread online. By streamlineing the process, the CCK gives authors more time to focus on crafting their message.
The CCK uses some new tools: metadata, Markdown language, and version control. The following tutorials explain these, and more.
