Power to the authors! Toward achieving fast, flexible visual content authoring

Rick Cecil

Web content is no longer single blocks of text with an image sprinkled in for effect. (Was it ever, really?) Authors are looking for more intuitive and sophisticated content creation tools that free them to better engage with their audience and drive real results – they need things like rich content blocks, calls-to-action, testimonials, and slideshows.

Of course, Drupal can do all these things -- if you don’t mind tinkering within the deep dark recesses of the platform – and what content author doesn’t love doing that? Drupal is behind the curve here. Content authors have been clamoring (for years) for visual ways to create targeted landing pages and custom layouts without involving designers or developers. But, designers want to ensure the authors adhere to design guidelines and developers are concerned about the quality of code and broken pages that they will ultimately need to fix.

We were recently engaged to solve this very problem. Our client’s marketing team is working in a fast-paced environment, creating thousands of targeted landing pages that need regular revisions. The process of involving designers, developers, and authors to build these has become untenable – to the point where they are considering abandoning Drupal. Luckily we talked them off that ledge by offering some great solutions.

During this talk we’ll explore

Visual content authoring options, including paragraphs on steroids and some drag & drop javascript options.

highlight the benefits and challenges, of these approaches, such as structured vs unstructured data

Working around the limitations inherent in D8’s new layout builder and the current state of “outside in” functionality

Join us as we highlight our thoughts and ideas on improving the content editing experience, we also will encourage attendees to share the challenges and options they’re seeing when it comes to visual content building and editing in Drupal.

https://www.midcamp.org/topic/power-authors-toward-achieving-fast-flexible-visual-content-authoring

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