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By ESchuderer on
Hey Drupal Community,
we are currently looking into CMS alternatives for the near to mid future with a very strong focus on easy content authoring / editing.
We pretty much like the editor weblication ships with, is something this flexible possible with Drupal when using Panels?
There are some pictures on the - sadly only german - documentation: Weblication Documentation
Specifically the very easy way to add content elements in any order and even being able to have child elements for grids etc. while keeping the backend / inline edit view very close to the actual page view.
Therefore we really appreciate drupals modern architecture, inline editing and the fields api seem very nice and flexible to us.
Comments
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This kind of content authorship is not the focus of Drupal. Content in Drupal is generally more structured than this. Panels is a way to bring some of this functionality into a Drupal site, but honestly, if it's really important for your project to get that right, I would look elsewhere.
Personally I was first exposed to this type of authorship when evaluating Typo3 as a CMS for a large corporate website. It lets you define pages which are really just zones that the author can fill with arbitrary parts. The back end is organized like the front end. It also allows the author to place content in a tree which allows a simple way to create a website full of sections and pages which can be really deep.
These concepts kind of blew my mind and since then I have tried to replicate them in Drupal. Panels helps, but it's not an interface I would expose to content authors. Maybe someone else has a better result, but I have tried and failed to provide exactly this experience with Drupal.
We ended up not using Typo3, so I can't really recommend it (there are weaknesses too), but I think you should look at it if you want this kind of authoring experience.
- Brendan
Thanks for your comment!
Thanks for your comment!
I've found some plugins which add those features:
While the second one seems intresting it still dosn't look like what we want, maybe we'll just customize it or create our own plugin. Sitefinity got a nice editor as far as I can tell, but sadly ASP.NET is not always an option.
May I ask which CMS you decided to use?
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I had not seen either of those. For our purposes, it asks a lot of the content author. I can't imagine my copy writers creating layouts.
Contrast that to this (around 5:30 is where he creates some content):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oFotIvOpUo
In the end, we chose neither. We had a legacy website full of pages and pages and pages of deep historical stuff which Typo3 would have managed well and Drupal not so well. And we had dynamic data like case studies, events, user groups and news which is right up Drupal's ally, but Typo3 was terrible for. And we also had some web applications peppered through the site, which neither would be great for but Drupal would have been better. So, we built our own CMS using Symfony and the Symfony CMF.
If I could give you some advice, try to play to the strength of the technology you choose. Earlier in my career, I spent much of my time trying to make web technologies do what I wanted regardless of their own strengths and weaknesses. It caused a lot of frustration.
I love Drupal. It has many strengths that make it right for tons of websites and applications. But this type of authorship is just counter to it's fundamental content philosophy. That doesn't mean it's the wrong choice. I am sure you have a lot of criteria for choosing a CMS and maybe Drupal fits 90% of it and you will need to get by on Panels and the Drag and Drop Page Builder and maybe some customizations for this part. But if this is the most important thing, I think Drupal is the wrong choice.
- Brendan
Thanks for the very detailed
Thanks for the very detailed information! We'll just evaluate the options. :)
You pretty much nailed it, we love Drupals features but also like to give website owners the ability to easily click pages together on top of what Views offer.
Try Quick Edit module
You can try Quick Edit module (https://www.drupal.org/project/quickedit). It will give you the flexibility in-place editing of content.
Hey there,
Hey there,
while quick edit offers inline editing it's not what we are looking for.
See http://innovastudio.com/builderdemo/example1.html for example.
Currently we are experimenting with / building the "frontend" view for such functionality and will either integrate it with Drupal 8 or just use Laravel for a custom CMS.
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A couple of options not yet mentioned here are panelizer and asset. I've recently created something very similar to the innovastudio link with the asset and paragraphs modules.