Blogs

Preston So

March 11, 2020

Claro at center stage:

How Claro became more accessible and stayed innovative - part 3

Throughout Drupal's existence, no other changes have made as much an impression on users as refreshes of the administrative interface in Drupal. Content editors and site builders have a long list of expectations when it comes to the editorial experience they wish to use, and surveys and tests had shown that Seven was showing its age. Now, thanks to Claro, the new administration theme for Drupal 8, user interfaces for all editors in Drupal are...

Preston So

March 10, 2020

Collaborative editing in Gutenberg:

Challenges of building collaborative editing in Gutenberg - part 2

How realistic is collaborative editing in content management systems? Many ecosystems have tried to enable shared editing through plugins and add-ons, but WordPress is the first to bring support for collaborative editing to content management systems with the goal of offering it out of the box. With the advent of Yjs, an open-source framework for real-time collaboration, the Gutenberg team is working with the help of Tag1 Consulting to enable shared editing natively on WordPress...

Preston So

March 05, 2020

Decentralized collaboration with Yjs and WebRTC: How to get started with peer-to-peer editing - part 1

Peer-to-peer collaborative editing is one of the most fascinating frontiers of editorial collaboration in our industry. As a longstanding requirement with formidable technical challenges, enabling collaborative editing in a decentralized fashion has been a dream for many years. However, with the advent of emerging technologies in the real-time collaboration space, most notably Yjs and WebRTC, the possibilities for peer-to-peer editing are not only realistic but compelling for a wide range of ecosystems. With the help...

Preston So

March 04, 2020

Claro at center stage:

How Claro found inspiration in modern design patterns - part 2

Across Drupal's storied history, perhaps the most noticeable — and visible — changes in the CMS's evolution have come from the redesigns of the administrative interface that underpin every user's interaction with the Drupal editorial experience. Now, with the release of the Claro administration theme, which replaces the Seven theme and focuses on content author and site builder use cases, Drupal has reached another important inflection point in the history of its user experience. Claro...

Preston So

March 03, 2020

Collaborative editing in Gutenberg: Motivating real-time shared editing in WordPress - part 1

Collaboration is key to content management workflows, whether from the editor, marketer, or developer perspective. Nonetheless, one of the remaining unexplored areas for effective content collaboration on the web are content management systems (CMS). Because of technical limitations, CMSs have long been hamstrung in their ability to provide the sort of rich collaboration workflows other applications like Google Docs enable out of the box. Fortunately, collaborative editing in storied CMSs like WordPress and Drupal may...

Preston So

February 27, 2020

Insider insights on rendering and security features: What the future holds for decoupled Drupal - part 2

As another decade comes to a close in Drupal’s long and storied history, one important trend has the potential to present amazing — or unsettling, depending on how you look at it — opportunities and shifts in the Drupal ecosystem. That trend is decoupled Drupal.

Preston So

February 26, 2020

Introducing the new administration theme for Drupal 8

Claro at center stage - part 1

Drupal has been around for a long time, and its content editing interface has undergone several refreshes over the years, most notably during the Drupal 7 development cycle with the Seven theme. Another administration theme is rapidly changing the game for Drupal site builders and content editors, and it's part of a Drupal core strategic initiative—one of the Drupal community's utmost priorities and innovation streams—to modernize the front end of Drupal for a variety of...

Preston So

February 25, 2020

What the future holds for decoupled Drupal: Insider insights on the commercial and API landscapes (part 1)

Over the last five years, decoupled Drupal has grown from a fringe topic among front-end enthusiasts in the Drupal community to something of a phenomenon when it comes to coverage in blog posts, tutorials, conference sessions, and marketing collateral. There is now even a well-received book by this author and a yearly conference dedicated to the topic. For many Drupal developers working today, not a day goes by without some mention of decoupled architectures that...

Preston So

February 19, 2020

Yjs deep dive: How Yjs handles offline editing and versioning - part 4

The previous blog post in this multi-part series about Yjs, the real-time collaboration framework, dealt with awareness therein, and how encoding deletions in the Yjs way can yield substantial performance dividends. Recently, during its assessment of a variety of tools for collaborative editing, Tag1 Consulting opted for Yjs and ProseMirror for an ambitious shared editing project at a well-known Fortune 50 company.

Preston So

February 19, 2020

Adding Collaborative Capabilities to the Gutenberg Editor with Yjs - Tag1 Team Talk #011

Content collaboration has long been table stakes for content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, but what about real-time peer-to-peer collaboration between editors who need direct interaction to work on their content? The WordPress Gutenberg team has been working with Tag1 Consulting and the community of Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, to enable collaborative editing on the Gutenberg editor. Currently an experimental feature that is available in a Gutenberg pull request, shared editing in...