Preston So

Claro at center stage:

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

Collaborative editing in Gutenberg:

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

Claro at center stage:

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

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

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

Introducing the new administration theme for Drupal 8

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

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

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...

Preston So

An effective administrative interface is table stakes for any content management system that wishes to make a mark with users. Claro is a new administration theme now available in Drupal 8 core thanks to the Admin UI Modernization initiative. Intended to serve as a logical next step for Drupal's administration interface and the Seven theme, Claro was developed with a keen eye for modern design patterns, accessibility best practices, and careful analysis of usability studies...

Preston So

Drush 10 is around the corner:

If you’ve touched a Drupal site at any point in the last ten years, it’s very likely you came into contact with Drush (a portmanteau of “Drupal shell”), the command-line interface (CLI) used by countless developers to work with Drupal without touching the administrative interface. Drush has a long and storied trajectory in the Drupal community. Though many other Drupal-associated projects have since been forgotten and relegated to the annals of Drupal history, Drush remains...