Explore what competitors are doing [#1564900]

One of the goals for Spark is to raise the bar of Drupal authoring experience to be comparable to or even beat that of some of our competitors.

Chris Strahl and I gave a presentation on this at DrupalCon Denver (http://denver2012.drupal.org/content/five-things-we-need-create-awesome-...). Unfortunately, the video seems to have been lost. :( However, the slide deck with the links to the videos we showed are in there. Unfortunately that means the SquareSpace Beta demo at the end is lost, and was one of the most impressive. :(

Internally, within Acquia, the general consensus has been that Adobe CQ is the bar we want to reach. There's an intro video at http://www.day.com/day/en/resources/video/webcontentmanagement-overview.... (warning: includes "ENTERPRISE VOICE" :P).

See also http://groups.drupal.org/cms-feature-reviews, a group for cataloguing + discussing this kind of competitive analysis.

Comments

Comment #1

corbacho CreditAttribution: corbacho commented 10 May 2012 at 21:15

I found Adobe CQ not so pleasant UI, except the inline editing.

About SquareSpace video, is much more inspiring. Do you mean http://beta.sqsp.com ? There is a demo video there, btw I love that song : RJD2 "Ghostrider Remix", and there is another video at http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/2011/10/21/squarespace-6.html

Comment #2

webchick

she/they

English

Vancouver 🇨🇦

CreditAttribution: webchick commented 10 May 2012 at 22:00

Oh, awesome! Yes, that's totally what we demoed. Thanks, I should've checked the website for a demo, duh. :)

The general admin UI of Adobe CQ totally sucks, agreed. However, its capabilities are *super* powerful. Not sure that comes across in that demo video or not.

Comment #3

Danny Englander

(he/him)

CreditAttribution: Danny Englander commented 15 May 2012 at 15:36

Wow, the SquareSpace videos are brilliant. I love how you can drag images around on a front facing page and resize containers, it sort of takes wysiwyg to the next level. I am currently developing my second responsively designed site for a client (using Omega, the first time I tried Adaptive Theme) and I've been struggling with my potential users / editors putting images in posts (so they can have them where they desire in a node) that would be responsive. Though I am using the Adaptive Image Module, it really is more suited for fields. Once you take that image from a field and put it in the wysiwyg (such as Field Insert), it looses it's adaptive properties.

SquareSpace seems to address some of these issues. It would be awesome if Spark ended up with some of these attributes. I'm a Themer / JQuery / Site builder person so will look forward to testing anything that comes out of this project.

Comment #4

corbacho CreditAttribution: corbacho commented 15 May 2012 at 19:33

Weebly also has an drag&drop interface (See demo video ) http://www.weebly.com

Multi-column layout demo (similar to Panels):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n83d1zJABY&feature=player_embedded

Comment #5

corbacho CreditAttribution: corbacho commented 15 May 2012 at 19:39

Concrete5 demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJrFBDLqm7A
It has a Drupal-ish interface, but more ajaxified, and loading time is fast at least in the video.

Comment #6

Danny Englander

(he/him)

CreditAttribution: Danny Englander commented 15 May 2012 at 19:53

Here's an interesting one: "Carrington Build" for WordPress:

http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build/ -- It reminds me of panels but it's right in a node and on top of the wysiwyg.

Comment #7

escoles CreditAttribution: escoles commented 15 May 2012 at 19:54

Worth mentioning here something brought up in another Spark thread: It would be a really good idea to make sure that all of this works (or at least degrades sensibly) within a responsive & mobile-first framework. It's not impossible -- I've been imagining some ways of doing that -- but it should be in the architecture discussions from square one. In the near future the majority of web browsing will be on mobile devices, mostly phones (if it's not already -- it's far and away the majority in some demographics, like young American latinos).

Comment #8

nbchip CreditAttribution: nbchip commented 16 May 2012 at 03:18

My wishlist for Node content editing:
- no complex WYSIWYG editor as tinyMCE. Everything is a block and only block specific options are displayed > ribbons
- Insert Fields and "Field collections" as building blocks of Node Content via Drag&Drop and use inline Aloha editor for text fields > as in www.impresspages.com , www.weebly.com
- Rearrange Layout of previously added Blocks and add Columns > as in beta.sqsp.com , www.weebly.com , http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/carrington-build/
- Use external sources for Blocks > as in storify.com/create
- Choose widget. Some blocks have option of multiple widgets for styling output > different types of slideshows for images etc.

I wish we had better brainstorming platform then this comments. (P.S i need help building one ;)

GoodLuck!

Comment #9

tmsimont CreditAttribution: tmsimont commented 22 April 2013 at 23:31

Version:

» 8.x-1.x-dev

I strongly recommend looking at these competitors for inspiration (both links have video demos)

SquareSpace's LayoutEngine
SiteFinity

Comment #10

mthart CreditAttribution: mthart commented 7 June 2013 at 19:52

Ok, finally jumping into the fray.

Here are two that are the bleeding edge of where content creation and editing are going IMHO, with an emphasis on a minimal UI and less cognitive overload, specifically targeting writers.

From Ev Williams, founder of Blogger and Twitter:
www.medium.com
https://medium.com/about/9e53ca408c48
https://medium.com/about/df8eac9f4a5e

From John O'Nolan, Deputy Head of the WordPress UI Group:
http://tryghost.org/
http://tryghost.org/features.html
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-pla...

These seem closer to the ideal that @eaton and @karenmcgrane have been talking about.

Less is more...