How to Start Building a Content Hub with Agility CMS

Each organization has content that's important to it. It could be your list of press releases, articles, or blog posts. It could be your amazing photos and videos, or maybe it's the list of the very products that you sell. Getting all of these things in a centralized, easy-to-manage place is what creating a Content Hub is all about.

We'll show you the benefits of building a Content Hub, and how Agility CMS can help you get there.

Bringing It All Together

Often our content is spread out across many different formats, locations, and technologies. We may have it in spreadsheets, databases, file folders, and even older traditional CMSes. Bringing this content together can into a Content Hub helps you identify what content you have and its value. Bring that content out of those spreadsheets and databases. Bring all the assets and files off the hard drives and SharePoint portals to be catalogued and used.

There are lots of ways to get content into your hub. You can do a one-time import from an Excel spreadsheet or with the Content Management SDK. You could also use the SDK to do a synchronization of content from an external database or API.

Agility's Zapier Integration is an excellent place to start if you want to connect your Content Hub to an external system with a well-defined API.

A Single Source of Truth

In many cases, your content exists in multiple copies and versions. There can be legitimate reasons for this - often, systems cannot connect to each other (like a legacy CMS), and you need to copy that content to display it online. A Content Hub can eliminate the need to copy your content to multiple places. Instead, any digital property that needs to access a piece of content can pull it from the Agility CMS Content Hub.

Once you get your content centralized, maintaining only a single copy, your team can be much more productive. Your teams can create new content more efficiently, and they can take advantage of what they have more effectively. The ROI (return on investment) for the time spent working with content can increase dramatically with a Content Hub.

Store All the Things

You may be wondering what exactly should go into your Content Hub? Agility can store just about any content or file asset that you have. It's up to you to decide what the structure of your hub looks is. Your team will be managing and working with this content regularly, so it needs to be in a format that works with their skillset.

There are two primary considerations to take into account when deciding on the format for how you'll store content in your hub:

Store items in their entirety in the hub. If you have external content that you are bringing into the hub, you may want to allow your team to edit and curate that content before consuming it on a service or website. In this case, you should pull the entire item into Agility CMS.
Link items to an external source and combine them later. If you have an external system with data that you don't need to curate or doesn't require content workflow from your team but still needs to link it to the content in the hub, you can store an identifier in a hidden field to that item in the content hub. We recommend also pulling in a human-readable value to display in the CMS too. Your content team will thank you.

Content Architecture

The process of creating your content models, defining the types, fields and relationships, is all part of your Content Architecture. Setting up a logical and practical Content Architecture is key to the success of your Content Hub. Certainly, reach out to the Agility CMS team for help on setting up your architecture for the first time. There are many pitfalls and gotchas to avoid; you can gain some fantastic benefits by doing this the right way.

Finally: Omnichannel Content

You've made it to the point where all of your efforts can start to pay off! Your content is centralized and sitting in the hub, ready and waiting to be used wherever you need it. Websites, mobile apps, email templates, digital signage, smart TVs, and more: your content is ready to be used however you need it.