Preston So

What happens when you have a connection that isn't working, but you have a mission-critical document that you need to collaborate on with others around the world? The problem of peer-to-peer collaboration in an offline environment is becoming an increasingly pressing issue for editorial organizations and enterprises. As we continue to work on documents together on flights, trains, and buses, offline-first shared editing is now a base-level requirement rather than a pipe dream. Yjs, an...

Preston So

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | At the moment, real-time collaboration is one of the hottest topics in the content management space. After all, one of the key features still absent from many content management systems (CMS) is shared editing among multiple users that successfully handles a variety of conditions. Applications like Google Docs, for instance, leverage a centralized server that manages all...

Preston So

Decoupled Drupal has been a trending topic for years in the Drupal community as well as the larger CMS landscape. What do some of the pioneers of the decoupled Drupal phenomenon have to say about what's possible today for decoupled Drupal and what's in store for practitioners? From GraphQL v4, to live preview with Gatsby, to Web Components browser support, innovation in the Drupal community is now quickly challenging some of our initial assumptions and...

Preston So

Over the course of Drupal’s lengthy history, one of the most common feature requests has been automatic updates. A common complaint of Drupal site administrators, especially those who have smaller sites updated less frequently, is the frequently complex and drawn-out process required to update a Drupal site from one minor version to another. Updates can involve a difficult set of highly specific steps that challenge even the most patient among us. Indeed, many in the...

Preston So

WebRTC, a protocol that facilitates peer-to-peer communication between two clients via the browser, is now supported by all modern browsers. Since its introduction it has mainly been used for web conferencing solutions, but WebRTC is ideal for a variety of other use cases as well. Because of its wide platform support, creating peer-to-peer applications for the web is now more straightforward than ever. But how do you manage many people working together at the same...

Preston So

With the release of Drupal 8.8, Drush is also due for an upgrade — to Drush 10. For this venerable command-line interface that many Drupal developers know intimately well, what does the present and future look like? What considerations should we keep in mind when selecting Drupal Console or Drush? What new features are available in Drush 10 that characterize the new CI/CD approaches we see expanding in the Drupal community? In this Tag1 Team...

Preston So

Yjs, one of the most powerful and robust frameworks for real-time collaborative editing, enables developers to add shared editing capabilities to any application with relatively little effort. In order to make it so easy to use and extend Yjs, the framework abstracts all the complexities, many moving pieces, and deep technical concepts involved in empowering offline first, peer to peer, real time collaboration.

Preston So

Yjs is a very compelling choice when it comes to building real-time collaborative applications. A powerful open-source, offline first, peer to peer, shared editing framework that is modular and extensible, Yjs enables developers to easily add real time collaborative capabilities to any type of application. Rich text editing, drawing, 3d modeling... the list of potential use cases for Yjs is lengthy and remarkable. But how did it get started, what is the algorithm it’s based...

Preston So

In today's editorial landscape, content creators can expect not only to touch a document countless times to revise and update content, but also to work with other writers from around the world, often on distributed teams, to finalize a document collaboratively and in real time. For this reason, collaborative editing, or shared editing, has become among the most essential and commonly requested features for any content management solution straddling a large organization.

Preston So

Among all of the components commonly found in content management systems (CMSs) and typical editorial workflows, the rich text editor is perhaps the one that occupies the least amount of space but presents the most headaches due to its unique place in content architectures. From humble beginnings in discussion forums and the early days of the web and word processing, the rich text editor has since evolved into a diverse range of technologies that support...