Empowering Content Editors: Managing Content with Ease in Highly Complex Environments

Empowering Content Editors: Managing Content with Ease in Highly Complex Environments

At this year’s DrupalCon in Barcelona my colleague Bruno Bruno and I presented a talk about the editor's experience in Drupal based on the experience collected from numerous clients and UX specialists through our work at 1xINTERNET.

Why is it important to provide editors with the best tools that Drupal has to offer?

Modern web pages tend to have structured content, due to the fact that it is not only used for the display of information, but it also contains metadata that is exposed via APIs to microservices or for clients that will use it as a source for decoupled solutions. Moreover, this can help to make the webpage compliant with accessibility standards, as every piece of content plays its role in this. Having full control over the data models can lead to complex UIs for content editors because it can require having nested structures, long reference lists, and a lot of overhead to simply build a content page.

Artem Dmitriiev and Bruno Bruno
Artem Dmitriiev and Bruno Bruno at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 | Pic credit: Paul Johnson

At 1xINTERNET, we focus a lot on the editor's experience and UI that they face. As daily users, they should concentrate on producing content and media instead of digging into HTML markup problems or losing themselves in complex components. The company invested a lot of time to make our clients happy, and the summary of our research, built on their feedback and UI/UX designers' expertise, can be found here.

Importance of Organised Workspace

It’s important for content editors to do day-to-day work in a good working environment, and therefore, we need to make the creation and editing of content intuitive and logical. The first improvement in this direction is how the content forms look like. With new and modern themes like “Claro” and “Gin” even out of the box Drupal experience is already comfortable, but can get even better in combination with the “Field Group” module. When fields in the form are grouped together for example by sections of the page (for example header, main, footer parts) and placed in the logical way of how they appear on the site, this will help editors to easily identify the portion of the content that has to be modified.

Secondly, editors should only have access to the features that they need and not see anything “extra” that will only confuse them. That is why it is important to restrict and delegate access to the functionality so that it does not distract editors from their main focus.

Bruno Bruno
Bruno Bruno at DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 | Pic credit: Paul Johnson

Interactive Session

In our session, we briefly discussed all the modules that can help improve the way content is created and edited in Drupal. But our focus was on 2 modules that 1xINTERNET developed and contributed to the community: "Content Templates" and "Frontend Editing".

Our objective was to make the presentation interactive, so that the audience could try everything that was shown with the "Try Drupal" solution from 1xINTERNET: preconfigured Drupal with a demo of all best practices the company provides, including editor experience, SEO, decoupled solutions, and search. This demo is available for everyone and is individual for each user, so that it is possible to play around with all the features.

Content Templates module provides a user-friendly and flexible solution for creating and managing custom templates to control the layouts of content (nodes) and streamline editorial workflow. It helps to use an interface that is familiar to content creators from Microsoft Word or Google Docs where they start a new document by using the predefined templates. Moreover, the templates could already have some dummy content. This way, the template created by an experienced (advanced) editor can be used by a less experienced editor who will only need to fill in the content in the placeholders. This way, there is little room for error or complications, and it, of course, saves a lot of time in the effort to have the same look and feel across the site's pages.

Learn more about the module features here.

Frontend Editing, in turn, helps to fill in those placeholders. This module allows users to add/edit entities directly on the front end through a side panel, still using well-known form elements from Drupal, including media widgets, entity reference, and CKEditor. Optionally, it is also possible to preview the changes made to the content item in real time and look at how end users will see them on the site. This functionality is provided by the “All entity preview” module that is also supported by 1xINTERNET. I would like to mention that the module supports any content entity type: node, media, block, paragraph, and even user and menu link. Furthermore, it is still possible to use frontend editing even for a decoupled solution, as demonstrated in the presentation.

Learn more about the module features here.

In the end, Bruno and I received a lot of feedback from the audience, including questions and discussions after the talk. We collected good ideas for improving the module to make it more useful for other users.

Makers Do Drupal Better

The best thing about DrupalCon is that you meet brilliant people who are passionate about improving Drupal. One hour after our presentation, we met Brian Perry, who was presenting his talk “The Drupal API Client.“ I was very surprised to learn that he has integrated the “Frontend Editing” module into a fully decoupled NextJS preview of the content with the “Astro” library. This is a real game changer, as editors will now be able not only to preview their decoupled pages but also change them the same way they can do it in “coupled” Drupal.

Throughout the week a lot of people came to our 1xINTERNET booth and shared their feedback and ideas about editor experience. These were very fruitful discussions, as we know now in what direction to move for even better results.

As always, DrupalCon ended with a contribution day, during which some “Frontend Editing” issues were created and resolved based on the feedback during the week. I am looking forward to improvements that can help make Drupal better and more friendly to editors and end users. And maybe someday, one of our modules will be part of Drupal CMS! Let’s give it a Starshot!

If you missed our session at DrupalCon, you can watch it here.

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