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Modular Content
Great article: The way you design web content is about to change.
While it is possible to use TXP so that an article is modular, I’d love too see some of the ideas discussed integrated into Textpattern.
The Medium approach to content management UI has a lot going for it…
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Re: Modular Content
Isn’t that what we are already planning with custom fields in 4.6? Content can be described and modularised, what you do with it is up to you.
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Re: Modular Content
Thanks, Phil. That’s great to hear (I’m yet to try 4.6).
I’ll jump in.
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Re: Modular Content
The custom field stuff isn’t in 4.6 yet though, Stef is building the data model at the moment.
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Re: Modular Content
Sounds great (from the odd snippets I’ve read in the dev thread).
Together with something like plh_frontEdit I’d be set!
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Re: Modular Content
To be fair, the modular content to which the author of the article refers is a far cry from our notion of custom fields. Although I might have misunderstood his intentions (it’s all a bit vague) he seems to be advocating a template-less solution where content blocks are sort of ‘dragged’ into a blank canvas and the page is built up using that method. Then, when you ‘Save’ that view, it uses that as the boilerplate for all content of that type, or from that section, or something.
It all sounds very clever: drag body here, header here, footer here, sidebar here, blah blah, but in order to do that you’d still have to have some fundamental concept of ‘placeholders’ or a ‘grid’ (for want of a better analogy) in which to drag the content. Otherwise it’d just float in space and look crap. And then when you’ve saved the content in that configuration, surely it just becomes a “template” albeit one that’s built from drag and drop instead of typing in tags?
Like I say, maybe I missed the point. Either way, custom fields won’t let you do that. We still have Pages, Forms and Styles to make templates up for your Sections in which content is injected. It’s just the way you store that content in the database is likely to change and the types of content you can associate with an article will be more flexible.
Of course, if someone wants to come up with a plugin to do drag and drop template creation, then I say go for it!
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Modular Content
While I’m not a web designer supreme, even in my own imagination, this sounds like… well, ‘web page part’ in share point.
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Re: Modular Content
To be honest I didn’t read the whole article initially as I found it a bit dull! I thought they were talking of reuseable content blobs but they aren’t.
Just read the whole thing now and you’re right, it’s not applicable to Textpattern (or any real-world distributed CMS). It’s a tailor-made template system specifically for a small subset of known clients.
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Re: Modular Content
philwareham wrote #280119:
I didn’t read the whole article initially as I found it a bit dull!
Glad it wasn’t just me then… think I nodded off a couple of times.
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Modular Content
The article is good at presenting some other issues in current trends of web development. The “snowfalling” phenomena is real. I’ve already listen to clients asking for similar stuff, with paralax and lot of customized stuff, without knowing the real amount of work it usually brings. Harder to explain that those kind of special, custom developments are not usually CMS-friendly.
Re: modular content. IMO, what the author is suggesting is more related to giving editors and content creators more options when crafting their contents, particularly for story-telling or “transmedia” content. Those options are in the form of pre-established “content modules”, which are basically more granular forms with more content-tweaking options, without having to resort to WYSIWYG editors.
It goes in line with this article by A List Apart: The Battle for the Body Field.
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Re: Modular Content
maniqui wrote #280121:
more granular forms with more content-tweaking options, without having to resort to WYSIWYG editors.
Yes, and is precisely why I invented smd_macro so you could make up your own meta tags to hide clunky markup behind a shorter tag :-)
The smd plugin menagerie — for when you need one more gribble of power from Textpattern. Bleeding-edge code available on GitHub.
Txp Builders – finely-crafted code, design and Txp
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Re: Modular Content
maniqui wrote #280121:
Re: modular content. IMO, what the author is suggesting is more related to giving editors and content creators more options when crafting their contents, particularly for story-telling or “transmedia” content. Those options are in the form of pre-established “content modules”, which are basically more granular forms with more content-tweaking options…
Spot-on.
Has anyone tried Medium? Yes it’s a one-trick-pony, but it makes entering content a delight through the use of WYSIWYG in-place editing. It pulls us away from the idea of a CMS, offering instead the content formatted just how it appears on the final website. There is no disconnect for the user. You need to be registered to see how it works, but the article Editing in Medium has some pointers.
I love the way the content is treated as a narrative. Want to add an image here, an object there? No problem: here are your options. Easy for all users.
smd_macro does a great job for things like this (thanks Stef!), but when you’re faced with clients who have problems with the most basic Textile formatting…
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