Minimize errors and maximize development speed with Shared Content Models

Whether they want to sell more products or simply share a message: businesses worldwide use content to connect with their audience. It’s an essential part of every companies’ customer journey. But for parent companies that cover a wide range of subsidiaries, managing and developing content can be quite a hassle.

Let’s illustrate this by zooming in on an example company, and one of our clients: BNNVARA. BNNVARA is a media organization that operates several television, radio, and internet activities. They cover at least 5 national radio stations, 3 television channels and a website. All the major programs have their own content platform, targeting different audiences and user segments online. 

The development team at BNNVARA wants to work as agile as possible, so they decided to build a comprehensive content platform that exists from several content-based environments: one for every major radio and television show (brand) individually. By using this content platform as the centralized starting point, content editors and product leads at BNNVARA now have the opportunity to create, publish and manage content for all brands from simply one place. Instead of separating the process, the development team at BNNVARA decided to centralize it.

BNNVARA’s approach might not sound unique. Other content-driven companies, especially those that cover multiple brands, do the same. By selecting a headless CMS and building a digital experience platform, developers and product owners make publishing and managing content more efficient. But there is one thing different about BNNVARA’s way of work. Where other companies turn to regular content models to define each type of content offered in each environment, BNNVARA works slightly more efficiently.  Why? Because they use Shared Content Models instead.

As you may know, a content model contains detailed definitions of each type of content offered in all environments. It’s basically a blueprint for all created content, as all needed components are mentioned, and the relationship between all content types is visualized. With this, teams have access to a logical structure for all content created and published through a content management system. Content models break down the different elements of the content, making it easy to organize and stay consistent, no matter the input and situation. 

In most headless CMSs, we see the use of regular content models. These models are isolated and therefore defined for each environment individually, even though the layout or setup of the models themselves are usually the same - no matter the environment they’re used for. This makes them challenging to maintain and prone to errors.

This is where Shared Content Models come in. With a Shared Content Model, developers have the opportunity to create a single content model that can easily be reused across environments.  When you make changes in the Shared Content Model, all underlying models inherit the changes automatically. The biggest benefit here is that this workflow minimizes errors, increases development speed, and makes it easy to maintain a leaner code base throughout.

BNNVARA already decided it was time to ditch the inefficient workflow. Instead of using regular content models and managing each of them individually, they now use Shared Content Models. But as you can tell from this article, there are lots of companies like BNNVARA, and you can be one of them. 

Using Shared Content Models is not something developers immediately think of when they select a new headless CMS, or when they build a digital content platform covering multiple brands. But if you are looking for ways to improve your workflow, hoping to minimize errors and increase development speed: Shared Content Models are the way to go.

Today, Prepr is the first and only headless CMS that offers Shared Content Models. Curious what that means for you? Sign up for a free plan and start using Shared Content Models today. We’re sure you’ll love it.