This article introduces the content side of FORGE.

Topics covered here:

• FORGE Content
• Pieces of content
• Editorial entities
• Identity and taxonomy
• Graphic assets
• Permissions
• Ingesting content

FORGE Content

FORGE Content covers the content authoring, categorization, and publishing.

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

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

Pieces of content

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 together a set of other editorial entities – of any type – and treat them as a whole. 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 with a business-specific structure unavailable out-of-the-box with FORGE.

For example, editors may need the Event editorial entity to enter data about events in a consistent shape. 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: custom entities only need a configuration, no coding tasks are required. 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. 

And that’s where FORGE LIVE BLOGGING solution comes in – it lets you engage with fans in a simple and direct way, through which editors have the power to manage, produce and moderate content, all in one place.

Identity and taxonomy: slugs, tags, and relations

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 on its SEO score. 

Tags

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

Producers use tags to associate content to 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, you can use the tag Michael Jordan to configure a module of that page to show the latest Michael Jordan stories.

Add as many tags as you like so your content will appear 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 will often appear at the bottom of a story's page - depending on the design of a client's product.

Graphic assets

The FORGE Graphic Asset Dashboard manages as a file manager 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 front 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 the teams members based on their roles and assignments. FORGE Back-office meets this need by providing producers with a configurable permission management to set who can see what and which actions can do.

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 archive 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 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: In case of migration from another CMS (Content Management System) to FORGE, an adapter can be developed through the FORGE API, enabling content ingestion from other CMSs.

Next

Visit the The Content Manager basics page to further explore FORGE as a Content Manager.