Basic Content
Authoring Experience

So far, this book has covered foundational aspects of Drupal and knowledge of how to build Drupal applications. Chapters 14, 15, and 16 present the experience offered to content authors. This chapter emphasizes the basic content author experience offered for content types, nodes, and content rendering. Because Drupal can be readily configured, a site builder must have this experience. This chapter highlights how to perform the configuration, what subsequent experience is offered for authoring, and the subsequent rendering of the content.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

• Authoring content
• Authoring digital assets

Authoring content

Never forget the content author who is tasked with using the Drupal application you have built. Drupal has a lot of features, and structured content is not always intuitive. Many content authors who use Drupal for content management think the experience of authoring structured content is technical. It is important to demonstrate, train, and document this experience because content authors may change over time.

Important note

Do not forget about roles and permissions when looking at the experiences of content authors. It can be immensely helpful to have deliberate roles for authors or even different roles for authors who may be responsible for different content in the Drupal application.

The experience of authoring in Drupal can rapidly become better just by removing permissions for activities they do not need to do. This can remove specific administrative actions, such as managing Drupal projects, managing Drupal configuration, and viewing system logs. Roles...

Authoring digital assets

Chapter 11 highlights Drupal’s capabilities for managing digital assets. In that chapter, the three primary constructs were presented: files, images, and media. All three features offer slightly different experiences for content authors.

Given that entities have customizable fields, digital assets can be associated with an entity. Consider a banner image on a node. Alone, it may not be clear where that image is rendered in the Drupal application. At a high level, the motivation behind the file, image, and media field types was to incorporate digital assets into structured content. The general structure content editing experience is effectively demonstrated in Figure 14.6, but there is more nuance for each type of digital asset.

The following figure shows the experience of an editing form that has each of the three digital asset field types:

Figure 14.8 – Field widgets for files, images, and media

Figure 14.8...

Summary

Those building a Drupal application must not forget about content authors. The authoring experience is widely configurable and impacts nodes, menus, and digital assets. It is important to properly train, enable, and refine the experience for content authors to ensure the experience of using a Drupal application is intuitive, despite gaps in the experience between structured content and rendering. This gap can potentially be addressed by using Layout Builder, which is the focus of the next chapter.