After reading the book Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas it became clear that introducing new ideas and concepts, getting them across, and then doing them is a full-time job that should not be taking on by one person. It also should not be taking lightly. Needless to say, I wish I would of read the book before doing so as it may have saved myself lots of time. However, it seems the biggest hurdle is out of the way and we are finally getting down to the brass tax. This presents a new problem that once the idea is introduced and you start working towards the goal, you need someone who also understands the concepts that you are speaking of to explain this in laymens terms. They need to know the limitations between disparate systems etc etc. Especially if you are by yourself, it gets difficult trying to actually do the programming, be the vocal piece, explain your ideas, mock everything up and bringing it to fruition without being stopped. Especially, when dealing with an idea as obtuse as that of content. It also doesn’t help when people take their idea of content and then suggest how it should be managed. It’s a discussion espousing MVC and simple separation of presentation and functionality at the very least and it’s hard getting those concepts across to people who see a webpage and think of it as an actual page instead of different pieces of data presented on one page. This is all subjective though, because others don’t see the content the way a content manager or system administrator would. So it’s an education process which I really am struggling to find patience for but i’m getting better at slowly. It helps having someone who generally allows me to solve problems and I realize, it’ll probably be the same where ever I go; it’s extremely difficult to swallow sometimes though. It seems a large amount of this industry is so filled with bad habits that when you start talking about a smarter way to do things people can’t logically stop thinking one way. In this case, the difference between static and dynamic publishing or understanding that data in two different systems is notoriously difficult to get working properly. The Wordpresses and the MovableTypes (can be dynamic, even though there is no object model available) have made it very difficult for fast paced industries or consistently changing publishing houses to get their content out in proper fashion. At the heart of it is the fact that nothing is really static. Lets face it, this website may stay the same for weeks on end, but AOL, Conde Nast (magazine websites), Nymedia, Digg, Universal, Apple etc etc their websites are constantly changing. Everyday the content is changing, the template or design of the site may never change but content is being added, deleted, removed. Apple is adding discounts or new computers, digg is adding stories and comments and Nymedia is adding all sorts of stuff, images, slideshows, articles, video. This, also compounded by the fact that the data at most of these places is simply not flat. It’s not just a blog post or entry. It’s a list of models being associated with a list of places or topics, being displayed on a webpage. So we are dealing with objects and for that we need an object database. (more…)