Click here to watch WYSIWYGGIN' out
Now that all of the Spark content authoring improvements are available in both Drupal 7 and 8, what's the next step towards effortless structured content authoring?
The fact that we have better tools will not, in itself, ensure that your content will be structured, semantic and re-usable. Getting the most out of the tools requires a disciplined approach to site building that encompasses a responsive multi-channel content strategy, semantic content types, well thought out roles, permissions and WYSIWYG configuration, as well as considered theming for whatever tag an author might use.
As sitebuilders put these things into practice as many new questions will be raised as problems are solved. Each new idea can lead to iteration and improvement in D8 contrib. A few things that already being talked about are:
- Markdown in the body field
- More minimalist/contextual WYSIWYG editing
- Using DITA or semantic markup to structure content at a granular level
- The ability to manage fields and display at the node level
- Extending in-place editing to views
The first part of the session will cover how Drupal 8 Authoring UX will impact site building best practices. The second half will explore questions about how Authoring UX can be improved or extended with plenty of time for input and open discussion.
Comments
Terrible
Next time please speak about what's in the schedule. How else are we supposed to plan what we want to go to? I can read about the evolution of the keyboard on Wikipedia. Worst session of the con for me.
Schedule lapse
Hi Andrew.
You're absolutely right, I should have taken the time to update the description given that I did shift the focus of the session away from the aspects of content strategy in the description so as not to simply duplicate verbatim what was being covered (quite cogently) by Jeff Eaton in his core session in the very next slot. I apologise for the poor documentation.
Having said that, I did let everyone know that at the beginning of the session that I would not be covering content strategy and several took the opportunity to move to a different session.
If you came in after I made that announcement I'm sorry you missed it and I'm disappointed you did not see any value in the exploration of the implications of advances in text input on the future of the WYSIWYG in Drupal. The history of the typewriter (the result of research from a variety of sources, including but not limited to Wikipedia) was just the jumping-off point for that story.
Perhaps you didn't stay for the rest of it since it didn't pique your interest. Understandable, but If that's the case I'd take another look. It's just this kind of "off the island" exploration that we spent a lot of time doing when we first started Spark and that certainly proved worthwhile.
Agreed, terrible
It's fine to change the session but you have to update the site and schedule so people don't waste time. The biggest disappointment was the wysiwyg talk the very next hour was packed, lasted 1.5hrs, and was the best session of the whole conference. So people definitely wanted to hear more about it.
More information
I don't think I could possibly have added anything more to what Jeff said on content strategy, (except for the question about schema.org that I asked him at the end). His session was insightful, well researched, and thorough which is precisely why, on learning more about it, I opted to focus on the things he did not cover.