BluePrinting Metaphor Re-imagined

Have you ever heard, "BluePrinting is Tridion" or "Tridion is BluePrinting?" In terms of functionality, I submit that a SDL Tridion BluePrint is one of the most awesome and potentially-dangerous weapons you can wield in your Tridion toolkit. Think Sword of Omens with a light saber blade and the One Ring embedded in the handle.

So how do we approach this versatile and dangerous tool? By talking about... kids, of course! Here are some misaligned metaphors and not-so-new thoughts on BluePrinting.

Misaligned Metaphors

From BluePrint... to Genealogy?

David Adams, Director of Services Solutions at SDL and a recent Innovate speaker shared some interesting points on the "classic" BluePrinting metaphor with me and Kelly Thompson, Global Education Manager with SDL WCMS (this was sometime before for their Innovate speech). He mentioned we use  "blueprint," a fairly specific architectural term, but switch to genealogy and object-oriented programming when we explain BluePrinting to the business and IT, respectively. On top of that, the phrase "Empty Parent" is devoid of any positive connotation.

I'm imagining the typical teen-angst rant, "I hate you! I wish I was never born! You're such an empty parent!" followed by a slamming door.

Some of the BluePrint lexicon includes terms and concepts that really fit a different, but possibly old, core idea about design and architecture.

Opportunity and Challenges for Third-Party SDL Tridion Tools

As a functional lead on the PowerTools reboot, I've seen a small glimpse of Tridion-related software development challenges and opportunities. Though the volunteer group doesn't charge for the PowerTools, it also doesn't support the "product" in the typical sense.

Its GNU GPLv2 ("do-what-you-want-but-keep-it-open") license even lets third parties charge for transfers and support. This creates an untapped opportunity to provide expert services or a warranty for otherwise "free" software, but with some interesting gotchas.

The challenge with any Tridion-related tool is deciphering who buyers and stakeholders are, managing intellectual property, and determining a viable business model.

You Need the Best Design Tools Money Can't Buy

I'm back on Information Architecture (IA) work collecting inputs into Functional Requirements documentation (for a Tridion project). Here are some interesting (and free!) tools that you might want to check out when working with page types, content types, and wire frames.

Lorem Ipsum just not meaty enough (is everything better with bacon)? Sounds kind of fishy? It's not. Except that it is (Tuna Ipsum).

What's Lorem Ipsum? It's place holder or dummy text. But it's not enough to have just text. We need image placeholders. How about full of kittens? Or again with the meat?

Want a screenshot? Chrome has its own app that does the full page capture. Fireshot is now available for FireFox, IE, and Chrome.

Happy designing!


Since we're on the topic of free and open source... wait, did you know what SDL Tridion open source project I was going to plug? Fine, I'll talk about it in the next post.

For the business analysts out there, check out WebSequenceDiagram, my favorite quick-and-dirty activity diagram tool.

Aint Got No (SDL Tridion) Workflow... Blues?

Chris Summers asks and suggests reasons why organizations don't implement SDL Tridion workflow. He's absolutely correct, but I think this extends beyond Tridion into the very nature of knowledge work, situational leadership, and mature business processes.

1. "[Tridion] Workflow is one of the least explored areas".

It may or may not be widely implemented, but we've seen frameworks and webinars (thanks, Mihai) on it.

Though I'm in the yet-to-program-a-workflow (as of 3/21/12), I wouldn't hesitate to document a process, though nor give my not-quite-solicited opinion.

Like most Tridion questions, we start with "how do you/would you do this outside of Tridion?"

I have the philosophy that if you can explicitly describe the steps you want in terms of actions you can do with the CME along with a basic understanding of programming, you can capture enough requirements to build an appropriate workflow, event system, or extension... more or less, with caveats on how long or challenging it would be to build. :-)  

2. Few organizations understand their business processes