In the age of digital disruption, organizations are feeling the pressure to sharpen their focus and eliminate waste in order to squeeze maximum value out of their budget. The growing range of online digital publishing platforms has jostled the need for attention alongside more traditional forms of media.
However, publishing content “everywhere” on the various channels – social media, websites, emails, text messages, and mobile apps can be challenging & a lofty goal. However, COPE is the hope that can provide a solution to this problem.
What does COPE mean?
The term COPE (“Create Once, Publish Everywhere”) is a methodology being adopted nowadays to create an echo system that allows publishing of the same content to all kinds of different outputs available in today’s technology space i.e., website, email, apps, and so on. This allows a scalable and reusable model to publishers without making too many changes to content structure and hence saving the cost and effort.
COPE is an organization’s strategic thinking for making its content more open-ended and at the same time flexible. Therefore, reducing the amount of work needed to publish our content into different mediums, such as websites, email, apps, and others. This is being accomplished by establishing a source that is more robust and can be adjusted with minimal efforts to match ever-changing technology needs.
The Right Way to use COPE: Separating Content from Design
COPE helps the organizations to gain maximum mileage out of every piece of content, repurposing it across multiple channels for multiple audiences. Strategizing the content that works for every channel is a tedious task since each medium has its own specifications. For instance, if the typesetter does not follow XML/HTML publishing processes, the same content must be converted again and again to match different kinds of software and hardware needs. The ideal answer to this situation is to separate form from content – that means ‘design & ‘content’ must be disentangled, and only the meaning of the content is used as the single source. The design can then be added in the next step, taking into consideration the nature of each channel – its features, formats, and algorithms.
For example, while writing an article, the writer might save the consolidated content to a central content repository and use different parts of it according to the medium – print, online, App, etc. The writer might create an informative article on a topic, complete it with a banner/image, provide an attachment for more details, construct the main article content, tag the content with some keywords, and embed media (video/audio) to enhance its effect.
The fields used on the form to create this article page can be repurposed:
- On the homepage page, it can be used with a banner/image showcasing the title of the article and a link to read the full article
- On the events page, it can be used with the title, a reduced image, a smaller section from the article, and a link to the full article
- On the media page, it can be used with an image and a link to a hi-resolution audio/video version of the same
- On a mobile device, you might decide to not load the video unless the user has a wi-fi connection
COPE requires a change in the way we think about content. Instead of creating big “chunks” that don’t allow to publish smaller chunks of content to different platforms, hence COPE requires the need to break the content entry forms into many structured fields and blocks. These smaller sections allow the user to repurpose a single piece of content across multiple different formats and platforms.
If we further extend this process to pre & post-publication process, if the front-end XML publish process is followed for any piece of content, its reusability at different channels of media is high as the same piece of XML can be converted to any device (hardware or application) compatible language using required XSLT and metadata tagging methodologies. Needless to say, “COPE” is revolutionary in allowing a lot of work to be done at reduced efforts, saving time, energy, and overhead.
