In this article, we'll explore the benefits of unchangeable content increments unlocked by a content management system (CMS) based on Git.
In a CMS based on Git, every incremental content change is stored in a commit that is given a unique, unchangeable ID, a “commit hash”. In technical terms such an unchangeable record is called “immutable”. Git-managed content therefore becomes “immutable content” in a CMS context.
The consequence of commits being unchangeable is that subsequent content changes we introduce must be stored as additional commits. Git cryptographically links each additional content change as successors to our existing commits, forming a commit history that joins our incremental changes together like a thread. The power of Git is that it is now able to securely tell us for every commit recorded, what exact content existed at a given commit, by quickly aggregating together all historic changes up to the desired point.
Let’s now look at what this means in practice for content management:
With Git commits being uniquely identifiable, secure, unchangeable records of content changes, we have the ideal tool to make content changes auditable.
This empowers businesses to conduct strict audits that review exactly which content changes were made by whom, at what time and what the final result looked like after a change, all backed by the cryptographically secure Git commit history. As old commits are never changed or deleted, we also have the ability to easily review the full history of all content changes ever made. This makes it trivial to answer questions such as “what content was visible two weeks ago at 3:17pm?”.
In case a content change is made that turns out as erroneous, such as triggering an incompatibility in a downstream application consuming our content, we can use the Git history to quickly rescue us from this situation: As we know directly from a commit what exact changes were applied to content, we can use a Git feature called “revert” that builds us a new, corrective commit that undoes exactly those changes of the commit that introduced the error.
Such reverts are extremely hard to do in other content management systems that are not based on Git, as typically no unified, central history across all content items exists.
A cache is a very fast temporary buffer for data that comes from a data source that is less fast. The idea of such caches is to not ask the original data source for data every time it is needed but instead to only ask once and then keep a copy of the response readily available in the cache. This way, subsequent requests can be served extremely quickly.
While filling such a cache is easy, refreshing it at the right time - when results in the original data source have changed - is hard. Although it sounds trivial, determining if anything in our source data has changed, is usually also hard to do.
However, with a Git-based CMS, invalidating a cache becomes trivial: Whenever we encounter a new commit hash, we know our source content has changed and that we must refresh the content cache.
Incorporating a Git-based CMS into your content management strategy offers numerous advantages that empower your team to manage content with enhanced efficiency, reliability, and control. By embracing the immutable nature of Git commits, you gain the ability to audit and approve changes, roll back to previous versions effortlessly and build lightning-fast websites with cache management.
Upgrade to Commitspark today and experience the transformative power of a Git-based CMS to unlock a new era of content management success.
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