No questions asked, the single most fundamental feature of any content management system is to be able to, well, manage content. Like many other areas of modern software practice, we use the acronym CRUD—create, retrieve, update, delete—to describe interactions with documents. It turns out that many of the features we describe for documents are also features of other object types in the CE, but we'll get to that a bit later in this chapter.
A document in the CE is an independently addressable object that has properties and optional content. Although it's not usually very interesting to create documents without content, it can be done and is sometimes used for things like content that will arrive later.
You may already be familiar with the notion of documents with associated internal properties. Most office productivity applications apply internal properties to the documents they create. These can include things like the author's identity, the time spent editing the document, a...