Metadata

Metadata is the description of data. When you buy a book, you want to know the author, the title, and publication date. This is metadata. The title of the movie and names of the actors are metadata. The names of the songs you see in your CD player are metadata. Without it, you won't be able to pick a book by its title, won't know who's playing in the movie until you have watched it, and won't know the title of the song you're listening to.

Metadata is extremely important. In Chapter 4, I'll show you how to define and use custom fields, and how to make your check-in form look exactly the way you want it.

And the last building block I want you to look at is the Content lifecycle.