Patent ID: 8805878

Claim:
A non-transitory computer-readable medium carrying computer-executable program instructions implementing a content management application, wherein the instructions are configured to cause a data processor to perform: creating hierarchical site structures that provide a level of abstraction from a content repository storing content items shared by a number of sites, each site of the number of sites associated with a hierarchical site structure and having a domain name and hardware serving the site, wherein the creating comprises, for each hierarchical site structure: defining one or more content objects; linking each of the one or more content objects to a corresponding actual content item contained in the content repository to thereby represent or target the actual content item; defining one or more channel objects for organizing the one or more content objects by channel; and defining a site object for organizing the one or more channel objects under a site; wherein each channel object of the one or more channel objects represents a channel and contains a plurality of references; wherein the plurality of references includes references to content items that are in the channel and a reference to the site to which the channel belongs; wherein the channel is a subdivision of the site; wherein each of the site, channel, and content objects has an associated set of content services; wherein each of the site, channel, and content objects is instantiated from a class that inherits the content services from a parent class; and wherein the plurality of references defines a relative position of the channel object in the hierarchical site structure, allowing the content items that are in the channel to be deployed by deploying the channel object from an enterprise environment to a site environment over a network.