Spark: Authoring Experience++ in Drupal 7, 8, and Beyond

SPARK: AUTHORING EXPERIENCE++ IN DRUPAL 7, 8, AND BEYOND

A N G I E “ @ W E B C H I C K ” B Y R O N

Site Builder Track - Thursday, June 5, 2014

ABOUT ME

Agenda

• Spark background info

• Demo of D7 vs. D8 authoring experience

• Tips on how to survive until D8

• What’s next?

• With audience participation. :)

What is it?

The goal!Build kick-ass features for the current release of Drupal so people can use them now, and propose them for the next version of Drupal

core to solve pain points in the product itself.

Our Approach

Technical strength

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 Sitecore

CQ5

Plone

Squiz

Wordpress

Joomla

Drupal

Open Text

Drupal wins the technical decision...

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8 Sitecore

CQ5

Plone

Squiz

Wordpress

Joomla

Drupal

Open Text

... but lags in authoring experience

Technical strength

Authoring experience

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 In-line editing

Workflow

Content staging

Media management Layouts

Localization

Mobile authoring

Ideal Product Drupal

How the Drupal authoring experience compares

Drupal experience

Ideal product

1. Design

• Run initial designs past internal team

• Create clickable prototypes in InVision and/or HTML/CSS/JS

• Do “hallway testing” on iPad, cell phones, etc. with both technical & non-technical users

• Refine designs & share results with community

2. Iterate++

3. Argue a lot. ;)

What areas has Spark tackled so far?

WYSIWYG

In-Place Editing

Streamlined Content Authoring

Mobile-Friendliness

Let’s see it in action!

Well that’s nice and all. But what about sites I’m

building today?

Drupal 8 Core Feature Drupal 7 Contrib Equivalent

WYSIWYG CKEditor https://drupal.org/project/ckeditor

In-Place Editing Quick Edit https://drupal.org/project/quickedit

Responsive Toolbar“Mobile Friendly Navigation

Toolbar" https://drupal.org/project/navbar

Responsive Front-End Theme Omega, Zen, Adaptive, etc. base themes

Responsive Admin Theme Ember https://drupal.org/project/ember

Responsive Images Picture https://drupal.org/project/picture

Responsive Tables Responsive Tables https://drupal.org/project/responsive_tables

Simplified Overlay Escape Admin https://drupal.org/project/escape_admin

What’s next?

Spark 2.0• First, get Drupal 8 a lot closer to done (Focus of the

team since Prague).

• Then, take a fresh look at competition, current trends in authoring experience & site builder experience.

• Next, pick the biggest pain points, build out prototypes to solve them in Drupal 8 contrib.

• Spoiler alert: Media and Layouts are likely to rank. :P

• Finally, propose those improvements for Drupal 8.1.x or Drupal 9.x (depending on scope).

Trends we’re currently watching

Minimalist Authoring

(The simplest thing that can possibly work)

Personalization

(The right content for the right audience at the right time)

Contextual Site Building

(In-place everything)

Your Ideas Here! :)

The following slides were created by a big, messy group “shouting

and sorting” exercise. ;) Everyone in attendance (~80-100 people) at the session had 10 minutes to shout out whatever suggestions under the given topic, which were typed down on the slides,

and then everyone got two “votes” (raising their hands). The results on the slides are ranked based on relative # of hands raised in a quick eyeball. Who needs science?

Biggest pain points in Drupal for content authors?

• Previews!

• Different body layouts: 3 columns, etc.

• Bulk uploads

• editorial workflow

• Links / File links => Within page, other pages, etc.

• Consistent content between pages — lock down fonts, headers

• Menu items

• Content model transparent / having to everywhere to edit everything

• Revisions

• File attachments: Desktop to WYSIWYG

• Paste from word :)

• “Zen” of admin themes for editors

• Terminology: region/block/etc. — content editors don’t care.

• Collaborative editing / Better integration with google docs

Biggest pain points in Drupal for site builders?

• Point and click form design!

• Roles/permissions admin

• Taxonomy term management sanity :) / Workflow for taxonomy

• Breadcrumbs

• Content migration

• Re-usable content that appears in different places

• Exportable blocks with editable content

• Better block visibilities

• Simple bulk migration (Excel-style)

• Display suite

Other projects to watch out for?

• Ghost

• Square Space (editing, theming tools)

• Linkit

• Site Core (content staging)

• BrowserCMS (in-place editing)

• GitHub (editing)

• Impress Pages (linking structured data)

• Craft

• Disqus / Livefire

Thanks!

WHAT DID YOU THINK?E V A L U A T E T H I S S E S S I O N :

A U S T I N 2 0 1 4 . D R U P A L . O R G / S C H E D U L E

Thank you!