Authoring is part of the Creation/Collection? initial phase of Content Management.

Authoring must be as easy as possible so that content experts in an organization can directly enter their informaion, which will then be forwarded by a workflow system to others for copy editing, approvals?, and publishing?.

Authors must enter their content without any styling or formatting, yet they should be able to see the results of their work in the context of a final published page (a preview?).

Authoring tools include WYSIWYG editors that allow authors to view their work as it will finally appear, sometimes on Multi Channel devices or platforms.

Authors may also work in the word processing program of their choice and then expect conversion? tools like Word To Xml will prepare their content.

In the simplest early versions of a Content Management System, authors enter their content in simple text-only forms. The forms provide editable text areas for headline, subhead, byline, body copy, etc. All the styling is then done by a Content Template applied when the content is published.