Content Editors Are Users, Too

Over our years of working with organizations, we’ve developed some strong opinions about how to make the Drupal content editing forms as helpful as possible. Our colleague Eileen Webb talks about this as “AX” (like “UX”, but for content administrators). We think AX is particularly relevant in the nonprofit sector, where there is often uneven funding for technology and extra staff turnover that can result in a loss of org knowledge. Since I find that I’m continually referencing these three A List Apart articles on this topic, I’m going to stash them here on our blog for efficiency’s sake. 

• Training the CMS, by Eileen Webb - This article covers the fundamentals of how we approach AX on Drupal projects. In short, we bake as much help text and AX-ness in as we can.
• The Homepage Exception, by me, Johanna Bates - Here, I share real examples of a homepage editing form from a Drupal site that we built. Also, the politics of homepages can be so complicated! We know. :)
• The Battle for the Body Field, by Jeff Eaton - If you want to go a bit more into the weeds about why fielding content (“chunks!”) and minimizing extensive HTML markup in content (“blobs!”), this article is fantastic. We’re on Team Chunk, whenever possible. But as the other two articles linked above point out, too, we know that sometimes Team Chunk needs to be flexible, because humans.