Spark is an initiative led by Acquia's Office of the CTO under Dries Buytaert, the Drupal project lead. We take a holistic look at Drupal's competition and design and implement features to help close the gaps. One big gap that has consistently held Drupal adoption back is that of the out-of-the-box content authoring experience. Hand-typing HTML like it's 1994, previews that aren't actually previews, and interfaces that are unusable on a mobile device all present big challenges for those coming to Drupal. While all of these problems have numerous workarounds in contrib, Spark's goal is to improve the Drupal product itself to eliminate this friction innately, so site builders can spend less time smoothing out rough edges and more easily focus on what they came to Drupal to do: build their actual sites. :) Spark is both a Drupal distribution and a set of discrete modules for both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 (in many cases, Drupal 8 core) which can enhance the user experience for your site's content authors, including: Mobile Friendly Navigation Toolbar In-Place Editing Responsive Preview WYSIWYG editing Improved Accessibility Redesigned Administration Theme ...and more! This talk will focus on demonstrating these new features and explain how site builders can take advantage of them, as well as talk about what the next areas of focus for the Spark team will be for Drupal 9 and beyond.

1. SPARK:
AUTHORING EXPERIENCE++ IN DRUPAL 7, 8, AND BEYOND
A N G I E “ @ W E B C H I C K ” B Y R O N
Site Builder Track - Thursday, June 5, 2014

2. ABOUT ME

3. Agenda
• Spark background info
• Demo of D7 vs. D8 authoring experience
• Tips on how to survive until D8
• What’s next?
• With audience participation. :)

5. What is it?

7. The goal!
Build kick-ass features for the current release
of Drupal so people can use them now, and
propose them for the next version of Drupal
core to solve pain points in the product itself.

8. Our Approach

10. Technical strength
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Sitecore
CQ5
Plone
Squiz
Wordpress
Joomla
Drupal
Open Text
Drupal wins the technical decision...

11. 0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Sitecore
CQ5
Plone
Squiz
Wordpress
Joomla
Drupal
Open Text
...but lags in authoring experience
Technical strength
Authoring experience

12. 0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
In-line editing
Workflow
Content staging
Media
management
Layouts
Localization
Mobile authoring
Ideal Pro
Drupal
How the Drupal authoring experience compares
Drupal experience
Ideal product

13. 1. Design
• Run initial designs past internal team
• Create clickable prototypes in InVision and/or
HTML/CSS/JS
• Do “hallway testing” on iPad, cell phones, etc.
with both technical & non-technical users
• Refine designs & share results with community

14. 2. Iterate++

15. 3. Argue a lot. ;)

16. What areas has Spark
tackled so far?

17. WYSIWYG

18. In-Place Editing

19. Streamlined Content
Authoring

20. Mobile-Friendliness

21. Let’s see it in action!

23. Well that’s nice and all.
But what about sites I’m
building today?

24. Drupal 8 Core Feature Drupal 7 Contrib Equivalent
WYSIWYG CKEditor
https://drupal.org/project/ckeditor
In-Place Editing Quick Edit
https://drupal.org/project/quickedit
Responsive Toolbar
“Mobile Friendly Navigation
Toolbar"
https://drupal.org/project/navbar
Responsive Front-End Theme
Omega, Zen, Adaptive, etc.
base themes
Responsive Admin Theme Ember
https://drupal.org/project/ember
Responsive Images Picture
https://drupal.org/project/picture
Responsive Tables Responsive Tables
https://drupal.org/project/responsive_tables
Simplified Overlay Escape Admin
https://drupal.org/project/escape_admin

25. What’s next?

26. Spark 2.0
• First, get Drupal 8 a lot closer to done (Focus of the
team since Prague).
• Then, take a fresh look at competition, current trends in
authoring experience & site builder experience.
• Next, pick the biggest pain points, build out prototypes
to solve them in Drupal 8 contrib.
• Spoiler alert: Media and Layouts are likely to rank. :P
• Finally, propose those improvements for Drupal 8.1.x or
Drupal 9.x (depending on scope).

27. Trends we’re
currently watching

28. Minimalist Authoring
(The simplest thing that can possibly work)

29. Personalization
(The right content for the right audience
at the right time)

30. Contextual Site Building
(In-place everything)

31. Your Ideas Here! :)

32. The following slides were created
by a big, messy group “shouting
and sorting” exercise. ;)
Everyone in attendance (~80-100 people) at the session had 10 minutes to shout out
whatever suggestions under the given topic, which were typed down on the slides,
and then everyone got two “votes” (raising their hands). The results on the slides are
ranked based on relative # of hands raised in a quick eyeball. Who needs science?

33. Biggest pain points in
Drupal for content authors?
• Previews!
• Different body layouts: 3 columns, etc.
• Bulk uploads
• editorial workflow
• Links / File links => Within page, other pages, etc.
• Consistent content between pages — lock down fonts, headers
• Menu items
• Content model transparent / having to everywhere to edit everything
• Revisions
• File attachments: Desktop to WYSIWYG
• Paste from word :)
• “Zen” of admin themes for editors
• Terminology: region/block/etc. — content editors don’t care.
• Collaborative editing / Better integration with google docs

34. Biggest pain points in
Drupal for site builders?
• Point and click form design!
• Roles/permissions admin
• Taxonomy term management sanity :) / Workflow for taxonomy
• Breadcrumbs
• Content migration
• Re-usable content that appears in different places
• Exportable blocks with editable content
• Better block visibilities
• Simple bulk migration (Excel-style)
• Display suite

35. Other projects to watch
out for?
• Ghost
• Square Space (editing, theming tools)
• Linkit
• Site Core (content staging)
• BrowserCMS (in-place editing)
• GitHub (editing)
• Impress Pages (linking structured data)
• Craft
• Disqus / Livefire

36. Thanks!

37. WHAT DID YOU THINK?E V A L U A T E T H I S S E S S I O N :
A U S T I N 2 0 1 4 . D R U P A L . O R G / S C H E D U L E
Thank you!