Can SDL Tridion Poop?

CMS Guru Gerry McGovern points out the Web has a digestive problem.

"If the Web were a digestive system it would have no capacity to poop. It just grows and grows and grows..."

In another post he continues:

"If most websites were organisms, they would constitute very dysfunctional ones. They would have a strange digestive system. It would have a capacity to eat lots and lots of content. But that content would either remain in the stomach or colon. Because most websites cannot poop."

Can SDL Tridion Poop?

Emphatically, yes it can!

The basic process is called unpublishing. This will remove an item from your site and everywhere it appears. If removing an item everywhere, unpublishing can even have a laxative affect.

Though you might call it a defect, the Tridion publishing and unpublish rights are combined. If you can publish you can unpublish. "I put you online, I can take you offline!" yelled the content author to the content component.

SDL Tridion has strategic digestive awareness and capabilities:

• Content Digestion. Both ways. It can let you remove content or a page from the site, then use it again later. No digestive metaphor needed, thank you.
• Delayed Digestion through Freshness. It lets you easily find all the places something is used at and lets you transform them specific to each the site. So the content stays as fresh as you can make it.
• Transparent Content Digestive System. SDL Tridion lets you search, find, and tag items and optionally group them into bundles for digestion, mastication, or whatever digestive-to-content metaphor is appropriate.
• Pinpoint Accuracy. For "dynamic" and modular content, it lets you, with single-item, pinpoint accuracy, add or remove items from one or more sites. That's pooping specific items at will, if you will.

SDL Tridion has the potential of a mechanical bovine with multiple stomachs ready to process content and send it out to pasture at will.

In addition, the latest version has a Bundle (multi-item) Workflow feature to let you put workflow items "on hold" to be revisited later, without taking up computer cycles. Customers are using this to appropriately implement expiration workflow. This is scheduled digestion at its best.

Will we see more customers making a leaner, meaner, more efficient customer-friendly Web? That depends. The capability is there in SDL Tridion and plenty of other content management systems, it's up to organizations to be brave enough to unpublish.

Read some more New Thinking, then go ahead, poop some content. It's only natural.