Content management systems (CMS) allow us to easily maintain blogs, news sites, general websites, and so on. Many of them are designed to manage pages of content, and provide tools to organize and customize how that content is displayed on the web.
However, as explained by Mark Boulton in his Adaptive Content Management article, and by Karen McGrane in her talk on Adapting Ourselves to Adaptive Content, we are increasingly delivering content not just to the web, but also to other platforms and channels. We need tools to manage pieces of content with meaningful metadata attached. Create once, publish everywhere.
The main idea is to store content cleanly, without intertwining it with presentation markup specific to the web. Because pieces of content is compartmentalized semantically, it can easily adapt to fit in different platforms and channels. Hence, it's called adaptive content.
Let's look at a quick example to compare:
Say I manage news articles and events. To create a news article, I would tell the CMS the type of content I'm creating, and be asked to fill in a form with individual fields tailored to news articles (e.g. headline, subtitle, full text, short snippet, and images). — i.e. pieces of content
With a traditional web publishing tool, I would probably have had to create a new page under News, and then type in and format the news article in a blank WYSIWYG text editor. — i.e. pages of content
As you can see, the first design allows me to individually specify content in its smallest semantic unit. When I want to display or consume it, the system can easily provide the pieces I need.
So here's my question: Is there a CMS that is designed specifically with adaptive content in mind, and that is decoupled with the presentation layer?
Note: This is not a discussion about the best CMS, or which CMS I should use. I am asking whether a very specific type of tool — CMS designed for adaptive content — exists for developers to use.
