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UX: Content Creation in Drupal 7

July 18, 2012

drupaluxlayoutwebdesign

With every new project that comes along, I try to optimize the UX of the content creation process of my Drupal base install. Mainly focusing on the content layout process and the means to add media and inline images. One very important part in the process is the WYSIWYG editor and it’s ability to play well with inserting images or allowing for easy linking of existing entity content on the site.

This has always been the weakest part of Drupal. I remember when I first installed Drupal 4.something a couple of years back, I was quite shocked by the completely borked user interface. I couldn’t, for the love of me, figure out what to do. And this wasn’t the first time I set up a completely new web app. But back then, I was just overwhelmed by the lack of everything.

One important thing that I didn’t know back then was, that the actual strength of Drupal lies within the vast amount of contributed modules. The problem is, when you’re starting to use Drupal, you have no idea where to actually start and the learning curve is extremely steep. And I already had a development and design background back then. One thing you figure out after you made it past the first weeks is this: you can basically create a user interface according to your needs, tied into a page’s frontend or hidden away in an admin area - as you prefer. You have total control over basically every aspect. Every aspect of the frontend can be changed in one way or another. It’s just that figuring that out and getting your tools together is a rather large investment of time but also, a very helpful addition to getting to know the powers of Drupal better.

Long story short, I tried dozens of small utility modules, at least a dozen wysiwyg editors and about the same amount of approaches to media handling. None of which completely blew me away. The limits are there, obviously. Some based on the architecture of Drupal, some by the fact that there was simply no one focusing on UX.

I really support the decision of the Drupal developers to focus on the general UX starting with Drupal 7. It is really needed. And so far, the changes which have been implemented have been always improvements from my point of view - some may disagree. But some things are still a little .. unbalanced. But most of them can be tackled with a couple of contrib modules.

There are a couple modules more which provide specific UX functionality (or hide useless default functionality to reduce clutter). But this should give you a good start to develop an easy to use administration interface. I’m really thankful that the creators of these projects provide their modules to the public. This is what makes Drupal so great.

There are tons of WYSIWYG editors around but for me, the only viable solutions are either TinyMCE or CKeditor at the moment. They are fairly well supported projects and provide a stable base of features for my clients. I’m following the Aloha Editor project very closely and played around a bit with an early version of the Drupal contrib module for the editor, too. In case you don’t know Aloha: It’s an in-place editor, supporting HTML5 and a lot of other goodies. Seriously, if this thing ever end up being production ready and has support for Link It and Insert, I will update all my client’s websites for free to use this editor.

I recently stopped using the WYSIWYG module, which allows to integrate several flavours of HTML editors by providing a configuration interface. Even tho it provides a stable support for a lot of editor projects, it lacks a couple of editor specific configuration options. So for now, I use the CKeditor module which provides basically all possible configuration options to integrate, well, CKeditor. Until something better comes along, this is as good as it gets. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad compared to other content management apps, but it’s also not perfect. In a perfect world, CMS BOX would have opensourced their front-end technology for IPE and page layout and the web would be a better place. But that’s not gonna happen anytime soon. So, until the Drupal module for Aloha reaches production ready status, I’ll stick to the known - and controllable - stuff.

However, those editors are meant for “Full HTML Textformats”, as in “Editorial Content”. If you need a basic editor with a bold/italic/cite/add-link button, there are a number of small and lean projects, for example to use as comment editors or forum post editors. Reduces load time, too. Yay!