Content lifecycle
The stages content passes through from idea and production to publishing, upkeep, and retirement, with an owner at every handoff.
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What it is
The content lifecycle is the whole trip, not just the publish button: plan, create, review, publish, maintain, and eventually archive or remove. Each stage needs an owner, an entry condition, and a clear next state. Otherwise drafts linger, live pages drift out of date, and nobody is allowed to retire anything.
Reach for it when a site has many owners, regulated claims, frequent product changes, or a growing pile of pages with no review date. A small lifecycle can be one status map plus rules for ownership, review frequency, change approval, archiving, redirects, and record keeping.
Gotcha: lifecycle diagrams often lavish detail on creation and reduce maintenance to one box marked 'review.' That is where the expensive work lives. Define what triggers a review, who can declare a page stale, and what evidence permits updating, merging, or retiring it.
Ask AI for it
Design a content lifecycle for [organization]. Map these stages: plan, create, review, approve, publish, maintain, archive, and remove. For each stage, specify entry criteria, exit criteria, owner, approver, required artifact, maximum age, and next state. Use a RACI matrix for roles and ISO 8601 durations for review intervals. Add triggers for product changes, legal changes, traffic decline, broken links, and owner departure. Return the state table, RACI matrix, and retirement checklist.