Key Points
- Structured content breaks information into reusable units that are classified with metadata and connected through meaningful relationships.
- Reusable content reduces copying and pasting, makes updates easier and helps keep information consistent wherever it appears.
- Domain and content models help teams define the concepts, attributes and relationships their CMS needs to support.
- A structured content CMS should provide flexible content modelling, metadata, reusable relationships, workflows, version history, localisation and API delivery.
- Liferay DXP supports structured content management with custom structures, centralised management, governance tools and headless APIs.
Introduction
What is structured content and how can you plan your CMS efforts to benefit? That's what this blog is about.
Common Content Problems Structured Content Can Solve
Laura heads the copywriting efforts for a local theatre’s website. She wonders why every year, when a new play is being added to the site, she ends up copying and pasting actor biographies from previous plays into the new play’s page via their CMS.
Rob is head of IT in a non-profit organization and is once again facing a content migration because of the introduction of a new CMS. Rob is frustrated because he thinks this is a good chance to reduce content, but nobody seems to want to own the content audit.
Clara works in the same organization as Rob. She heard of the new ‘site redesign’ and wants to talk to her manager about it. She talks quite often with prospective donors who can’t find key information on the site despite it being there. Clara believes the hierarchical navigation of the site is causing visitors to struggle to find content.
You might know similar stories, and what they all have in common is the way that content is treated – or the lack thereof.
What Is Structured Content?
Structured content is content that has been broken down into pieces of reusable units, classified using metadata and connected through meaningful relationships.
Laura could save time during both content creation and maintenance if she can create actors as content items, add their biographies to those items and link them to a new play whenever needed (Content repurpose).
Structured content would give Rob’s team the tools to work through the content audit and reduce content before migration. We will introduce domain and content modelling in this article. These will inform the approach you might take when auditing your existing content (Content planning).
Clara’s issue – buried, hard-to-find content – could also be resolved, as structured content helps surface content through its own intrinsic relationships. These go beyond rigid top-down, hierarchical navigation (Content discovery and linked data).
Structured Content vs. Unstructured Content
It might help to compare structured content with its unstructured counterpart. Unstructured content is usually stored as one large body of text and formatted for a particular page. The content might read well, but the CMS has very little understanding of what the individual pieces mean or how they relate to one another.
With structured content, those pieces are stored separately and labelled according to their purpose. In our theatre example, a play can reference an actor, a venue and a season without having to contain copies of all that information. If an actor’s biography changes, it can be updated once and the change can be reflected wherever that actor appears.
Benefits of Structured Content
Reuse content without duplicating it
Once a piece of content exists as its own item, it can be reused anywhere it is needed without creating another copy. This makes updates easier and helps prevent several slightly different versions of the same information from building up across a site.
Make content easier for machines to understand
If your content is all part of a blob of text (stored in a single text field in your CMS), computers have fewer clues about what each part means or how it relates to other content. By breaking content down into meaningful chunks and relating these appropriately, you make those elements easier for search engines, AI systems and other applications to find, interpret and reuse.
This is different from structured data, which is markup added to a page to help search engines understand what it contains. Structured content describes how information is organised inside the CMS. The two can work together, as clearly defined content fields can make accurate structured data easier to produce.
Publish content across channels
Structured content requires storing content relationships at the database level rather than the page level so you can introduce better semantic meaning into your data. This in turn makes your content ready for any type of device or screen size.
Keep content useful over time
Structured content is based on real-world concepts and relationships. This is an important aspect of a sound content strategy, as this approach helps content publishing activities remain valid and in line with the organisation’s knowledge over time.
How to Plan for Structured Content Management
Step 1: Research
Structured content starts with research. You need to start by talking to subject matter experts. They will help you map the domain by providing an overview of their world, describing what things are called and how they relate to each other.
Then you need to talk to users. They are the ones who will help you make the content more accessible. It is very likely they will have a different view than the experts: they might use different terms, for example. Talking to users should also help you prioritise the content elements that are most important to them.
Step 2: Map the domain
With your findings from research, you are set to create a domain model. A domain model is a representation of the key concepts in your domain and how they relate to each other.
Concepts are the things that make up your domain. For example, in a theatre website you might have concepts such as seasons, plays, actors and venues.
Relationships connect these concepts together. Following our theatre example, a domain model will describe how ‘seasons’ feature ‘plays’. ‘Plays’ have ‘actors’ and are played at ‘venues’.
Step 3: Create the content model
A content model will develop the abstract concepts in your domain model further into more descriptive objects as you add properties to them. Think of content modelling as the stage where you create your content types – the ones that will inform your CMS.
Again in our theatre example, an ‘actor’ content type could describe their name, biography, picture and, why not, their own social media account.
Step 4: Audit and plan existing content
If you are working on any kind of redesign project involving a large amount of content, you will need to perform a content audit. This can be a large task, but having a domain model in place can help you expose opportunity areas. You might need to expand your content to support content types identified in your model or, just as likely, reduce it by decommissioning pages that don’t support the model.
What to Look for in a Structured Content CMS
Once you have a clearer idea of the content types and relationships you need, you can start asking whether a CMS will support them. A structured content CMS shouldn’t force every piece of information into the same page template or body field. It should let you create content types that reflect your domain and adapt those models as your needs change.
When evaluating a CMS, look for the ability to:
- Create custom content types and fields without relying on a developer for every change.
- Connect related content items and reuse them across pages, sites and channels.
- Apply metadata and taxonomies consistently so content is easier to organise and find.
- Separate content from presentation and deliver it through APIs when needed.
- Support editorial workflows, permissions and version history.
- Manage localization without creating disconnected copies of the same content.
These capabilities matter because structured content is not just an implementation detail. Your CMS needs to support the way your organisation understands, governs and publishes its information.
How Liferay DXP Supports Structured Content Management
This is where Liferay DXP can help. It supports structured content management through predefined and custom structures that define the fields a piece of content should contain. Administrators can create or change these structures without coding, while authors work within a consistent framework rather than starting with a blank page each time.
Content can be managed centrally, connected to other content and delivered across websites, portals and other channels. Publishing workflows, permissions, version history and lifecycle controls help organisations govern that content as it moves from creation to publication. Headless APIs also allow the same structured content to be used by different front ends without tying it to a single presentation.
Choose a CMS That Supports Structured Content
Choosing a CMS is not just about deciding where content will live. It is about finding a platform that understands the content’s shape, the relationships that give it meaning and the many places it may need to appear.
A domain model gives your organisation a shared language, while a content model turns that language into practical content types, attributes and relationships. With both in place, content audits and migrations become more purposeful: you can strengthen what supports the model, remove what no longer belongs and avoid forcing useful information back into page-shaped blobs. The right CMS helps that structure remain useful as your content, channels and organization evolve.
Explore Liferay DXP’s CMS capabilities to see how structured content, flexible content modelling and governance come together in one platform.
Frequently-Asked Questions
What is structured content in a CMS?
Structured content is information stored in defined, reusable fields rather than as one large page-shaped block. A CMS can then identify what each element represents, connect it with related content and use it in different places or channels.
What is structured content management?
Structured content management is the process of creating, organising, governing and publishing these reusable content elements. It combines content models, metadata, relationships and workflows so teams can manage information consistently over time.
How is structured content different from structured data?
Structured content describes how information is organised inside a CMS. Structured data is markup added to a published page to help search engines understand its meaning. Structured content can make accurate structured data easier to produce, but the two are not the same.
Does structured content require a headless CMS?
No. A headless CMS commonly uses structured content because it delivers content to front ends through APIs, but traditional and hybrid CMS platforms can also support structured content. The important question is whether the CMS can separate content from presentation and manage reusable content types and relationships.
What should you look for in a structured content CMS?
Look for flexible content modelling, reusable content items, metadata and taxonomy tools, relationship management, APIs, localization, workflows, permissions and version history. The CMS should support the way your organisation understands its information rather than forcing everything into fixed page templates..
