Admin user experience

Group attendees, consist of WordPress, Drupal/Backdrop, Django, custom PHP/JS interfaces. WordPress "Guttenberg" product experience

• A replacement for shortcodes in the WordPress experience
• Deals with embeddables being represented visually but still easy to move around within the body.

• Front-end editing
  • Potentially causes problems that it leads editors to prioritize the desktop experience (or whatever UI they're using to edit).
  • However, it is frequently requested by the editorial teams.
• Medium editor: Clone or open-source version of the medium.com blogging platform.
• Future of content distribution: Likely to be content repositories that provide JSON feeds, but users use whatever editing tool they want and content can be presented in any way they want.
• Accessibility:
  • Depending on your audience, it affects the editorial exerience with creating content. e.g. requiring alt text may be necessary but it may make your editors resent the editing tools.
  • Try to use tools that notify users of accessibility issues but allow them to create content in a stream of consciousness but notify and fix the accessibility issues before or after saving.

• Structured content:
  • Developers leaning more towards using highly structured content where everything is individually set.
  • Structured content often runs into limitations where input data doesn't match the structure. e.g. attempting to list "requirements" as other referenced content, but the requirements are non-digital such as "bring a phone" which didn't match the expectations of the developers.
  • Can cause field bloat as each new type of structure adds more and more fields.
  • Show the user as few fields initially as possible.
  • Sometimes the concept of reused fields makes things difficult because the same field may be used differently in different contexts.

• Communication:
  • Talk to your editorial teams. Collaborate together between your developers and editorial teams
  • Document how to use the site, either written or video. Site-specific editorial guides.
  • Built-in/inline documentation in the editorial exerience would be optimal.
  • Continuous feedback is important.
  • New staff members are extemely valuable to solicit feedback about your editorial tools.

• Modeling workflow:
  • Frequently end up using Google Docs or external tool for creating content, then "lock" the content for production and push it out to the CMS.
  • Workflow systems: No successful experiences of those present for building full workflows.
  • Build different workflows at times for different types of editors: e.g. Power user vs. basic users. Content creators vs. translators. Moderators.

• Preview:
  • Use a separate window for preview. The simplest solution but it's dependent upon the user being able to save the form (e.g. get through all the required fields).
  • Preview window in WordPress allows you to preview even before all required fields are saved.
  • Split-column preview is possible when using JSON-fed content, the editor is creating the content and populating the JSON while the rendering engine is constantly pulling that out and showing it as the content is created.

• Testing for improvements/regressions:
  • How to measure improvements to the interface.
  • Come up with KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like how fast the content was created.

Using pre-build products like WordPress or even Drupal, end-users might not realize that the interfaces are even able to be modified.

Rocket surgey for dummies:

Round-table on random useful tools:

• WordPress: Advanced custom fields great for structured data
• Admin columns: Allows you to control layout on a per custom post-type
• Paragraphs: Pre-build collections of content pieces
• jQuery DataTables: Handy tool for presentation and editing experiences. Select all, search, filter, bulk operations on any listing of content.
• WordPress: Creating custom shortcode for any reusable pieces (such as sliders or embeds) in the theme or possibly a plugin.
• WordPress BeaverBuilder: Good tool for doing page layouts.

Picking a WYSIWYG:

• Ended up using CKEditor because it's the most popular.
• Editors are moving towards maintaining semantic structure a little bit better.