Preston So

When it comes to the most exciting new developments in the field of web applications, perhaps no other phenomenon is gaining as much momentum as the prospect of true peer-to-peer collaborative editing. With its considerable obstacles and difficulties, collaborative editing has long been one of the less-explored realms of editorial workflows. Fortunately, thanks to new solutions like Yjs and better browser support for the WebRTC protocol, real-time collaboration is not only possible but also accessible...

Preston So

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

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

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

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

In part 3 learn more about Yjs and the specific features that make it shine in the realm of real-time collaboration: namely awareness, offline editing, and versioning. In the next two installments of this blog series, we cover all three of these essential topics.

Preston So

In the previous blog post in this multi-part series about Yjs, we discussed the history and origins of Yjs, directly from its creator Kevin Jahns, as well as operational transformation (OT) and some of the advantages that peer-to-peer approaches to real-time collaboration have over the use of a centralized server. Tag1 recently selected Yjs as its shared editing framework of choice, pairing it with ProseMirror for a top Fortune 50 company.

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

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...