What's next?

Content
  • Updated

This article introduces the content side of FORGE.

Topics covered here:

FORGE Content

FORGE Content covers authoring, categorization, and publishing.

Editors are responsible for FORGE Content, which has three key concepts:

  1. Entity: A piece of content that's fully customized through the presentation side of FORGE.
  2. Blog post: A piece of content that's presented in the form of a blog.
  3. Tagging: The content taxonomy and structure.

Pieces of content

ContentArchitecture.jpg

Entities

An entity is a building block of content. These building blocks make up your digital product — whether that’s a story, a video, or a player profile page, this is the core of your product.

FORGE provides editors with built-in entities and allows administrators to define custom entities.

Built-in entities

Editors can build content with the following built-in entities:

  • Story: A news article published by an editor.
  • Photo: Editors can upload and edit photos in FORGE. Linking a Getty Images account to FORGE enables editors to see lists of recent photos and import photos straight from Getty.
  • Album: Editors can group photos in an album. Albums can form part of a news article or work as a stand-alone editorial feature.
  • Documents: Editors can upload .pdf documents into FORGE.
  • Editorial Selections: Editors can group a set of other editorial entities of any type and treat them as a unique entity. Editors can select editorial entities to push into an editorial selection by:
    • Manually selecting the set of editorial entities. 
    • Entering the tags of the editorial entities that must be automatically selected and configuring how many editorial entities to select.

Custom entities

Producers may want to provide editors with editorial entities for a business-specific reason that's unavailable out-of-the-box with FORGE.

For example, editors may need the Event editorial entity to enter data about events in a consistent way. In the screenshot below, the Meet all Alpha fans! is an Event editorial entity with a defined structure (Headline, Event Type, Header Color, etc.) and can be reused in stories and editorial selections.

Producers can collaborate with FORGE administrators to configure such custom entities.

Note: There is no coding knowledge required when configuring Custom entities. See Editorial entity customizations for further details.

Blog posts

Coverage of live events has been taken to the next level with FORGE LIVE BLOGGING. Fans can now dive into thorough, second-by-second storytelling that includes text, imagery, audio, and video, all in the same space.

FORGE LIVE BLOGGING empowers you to engage with fans simply and directly. Editors can manage, produce, and moderate content in one central place.

Identity and taxonomy: slugs, tags, and relations

ContentArchitecture2.jpg

Slugs

The slug is the human-readable unique identifier of an editorial entity. It stays at the end of every content piece published, for example, www.deltatre.com/what-is-a-slug – and impacts the SEO score.

Tags

Editors can add tags to editorial entities to categorize the content they create and manage. Tags define the content taxonomy, facilitating navigation and grouping of editorial entities.

Producers use tags to associate content with specific areas of the presentation. For example, if you want your final users to find the latest Michael Jordan stories on his Player Profile page, use the tag Michael Jordan to configure a module on that page to show the latest Michael Jordan stories.

Add as many tags as you like so your content appears across different areas.

Relations

A relation allows you to choose which stories and videos are related to the story you're creating. These related stories and videos often appear at the bottom of a story's page — depending on the design of a product.

Graphic assets

The FORGE Graphic Asset Dashboard is a file manager for any visual that enriches the page beyond the content: banners, logos, etc. It's up to the front-end implementation to locate those visuals in the back-end.

Being a file manager, producers may also decide — by collaborating with technical administrators of FORGE — to make those visuals available as a part of custom editorial entities (visit the Editorial entity types page for more information).

Permissions

Producers need to organize their editorial teams by assigning permissions and visibility to team members based on their roles and assignments. FORGE Back Office producers have access to a configurable permission management area.

Editorial workflow

Editors manage editorial entities and live blogs through a set of statuses that describe their availability to be delivered to the front-end:

  • Not published: The entity exists in the back-end but is not visible in the front-end.
  • Published: The entity is visible in the front-end.
  • Archived: The entity is stored and not visible in the front-end. Restore entities to remove them from the archived state.
  • Reviewed: An editor has modified a published entity. The entity is visible in the front-end in its latest published version. Updates carried out by the editor are not visible in the front-end until the entity is re-published.
  • Waiting for approval: An editor submitted the entity for publication approval. The approver can either publish or reject the approval.
  • Rejected: The approver rejected the entity.

Ingesting content

Editors can import content from:

  • Other FORGE instances: Import from either old instances of FORGE or other environments (e.g., from Staging to Production).
  • External sources: Import from a third-party CMS — This requires a bespoke adapter that ingests content from the third-party CMS to FORGE.

Next

Visit the Content Manager basics page to learn more about FORGE as a Content Manager.

Related articles