Component-driven Content Strategy for dea.gov and doctorswithoutborders.org

Kevin Walsh, Jen Harris, Iris Ibekwe

As a content strategist or site builder/architect, you’ve most likely encountered CMS bloat, like a Drupal website with three times the number of content types it needs, or a dozen taxonomy vocabularies that rarely get used.

In this session, we’ll look at techniques to fight that bloat by designing elegant and flexible content models with smaller “chunks” of structured content. We’ll discuss how a modular, or component-driven approach yields a better content authoring experience, and a much less repetitive approach to site building, theming, and site maintenance.

We’ll examine the implications of modular content model for content auditing, migration planning, UX and VX design, site building, and site architecture, and documentation. We’ll show how modules like Paragraphs and D8’s fieldable blocks allows site builders to solve edge cases in the content structure at a “lower”, more molecular level, without adding technical debt or complexity.

Then we’ll turn to some examples. First we’ll show how we reduced the number of node and taxonomy bundles from 50 to less than 10 for doctorswithoutborders.org, during a D7 to D8 redesign (relaunching early summer 2018), while increasing the flexibility and maintainability of the content and codebase. We’ll demonstrate the modular content structure for DEA.gov (also relaunching early summer 2018), and how content strategists worked with developers to prototype and then optimize the content model, using tools contrib modules like uswds_paragraphs. We’ll also show how we used Pattern Lab and KSS Node as living style guides to facilitate iterations and documentation of the content structure.

https://www.drupalgovcon.org/2018/program/sessions/component-driven-content-strategy-deagov-and-doctorswithoutbordersorg

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