Jesse, Don,
uh, Jesse Deck.
Jack.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Okay.
You survived.
This is the last session.
Is that bad or good?
Let's closer to the off party.
So that's good.
So this is Jesse, Jesse Dykeand we are doing Building,
building for content and editors.
So what, so US colors and designers.
Need to do to actuallymake their life easier.
Uh, Jesse is a solutions architect,tech lead at the workplace practice of
evolving web, and he's been in workplaceand other things for over 10 years.
And he's presented all over the place.
So you
know how over 10 yearssounds to you and me.
Yes.
I, yes, yes.
Don't, don't remind me
I'm much older than you.
Just means I still got plenty of time to,to, to, to learn more and present more.
Um, yeah.
Okay.
Well, thank you so muchfor that introduction.
Uh, everyone can hear me okay?
A bit closer
to the mic.
That much easier.
Stick it right on your chin.
How about that?
Okay, great.
Um, yeah.
Okay, great.
So my name's Jesse.
I'm gonna talk about, um,con uh, con entry basically.
Um, and yeah.
Uh.
I'm, I am, uh, a solutions architectand reference lead at Evolving Web.
Um, we're not super well known inthe WordPress ecosystem just yet.
We're, we're, uh, we're, we're getting outthere though, so I did want to talk a bit
about who we are as well, just real quick.
Um, we are a full service agency.
We're based in, in Montreal.
Uh, we do work allacross the US and Canada.
A lot of higher education andgovernment and, uh, healthcare.
Bigger institutions like that.
Uh, we also have our own event seriescoming up in, in New York City.
You may have seen a coupleflyers around and seen us few
or a few of us talking about it.
If you have any interest in it, comeand approach me or anyone else that has
their little evolving web logo on ourbadges and we're happy to talk about it
today, now, later, or at the after party.
But to get into what I'm actuallywanting to talk about today, the, the,
the meat of this, um, I wanna actuallyfirst just tell you what my, the,
the point I'm making right from thebeginning, and then I'll try to make
that point over the next little while.
Um, my goal basically is, uh, that,uh, I have this feeling that, um,
agencies and organizations, uh, don't.
Care enough about, uh, con contenteditors, especially, especially in this
world, uh, of, um, uh, of, of, of pagebuilders, full page, uh, site editors,
full site editing experience, all of that.
Um, so, uh, I really feel like a part ofthat is because there's no one person,
uh, who are rural who's responsiblefor this today in a lot of teams.
Um, and I think it's important thatwe as people building websites.
Take the time to consider how we can helpthese people to do their jobs better.
Um, so I'm gonna get into why, uh,and I'm happy to trigger some more
discussion if anybody has ideas,suggestions, disagrees with anything.
Um, by all means,
uh, before I get into that, I want tosort of present a, a bit of a scenario.
It was just, uh, uh, you know,Canadian Thanksgiving, a couple of.
Was that last weekend?
It was so long ago now.
Um, you know, when holiday, publicholiday, everybody's, uh, hours are
changing at their institutions, um, youknow, banks, grocery stores who really
knows who's open on a holiday like that.
Um, and you know, typically.
We might, uh, if you want to figureout, you know, who's open during
that time, you might go to likeGoogle Maps or something and see if
maybe they have the updated hours.
But then you see they have that littlenote that says, oh, it's a holiday.
The hours might not be updated here.
They might be completely outta date.
So maybe the next thing you mightdo is click onto the website
to see if the website has anyinformation about their hours.
Uh, and you're lookingthrough that and kind of.
Don't see any, any updatedhours there either.
Probably same exact hours saying it'sopen, normal business hours on that day.
Um, maybe also not helpful.
So where do you typically go to,uh, to find, you know, the, the, uh,
opening hours for a business or ifanybody has a, a favorite place that
they go to, to find that, other thanmaybe the website or Google Maps?
I was gonna say Google Maps.
I like that.
Driving there.
Phoning them.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
That's, uh, that makes a lot of sense.
Um, I find oftentimes if you goto Instagram, uh, or Facebook
or social media, one of thoseplatforms, they'll often have,
uh, the hours up to date there.
They'll do a post on the, on the daybefore or something to show their hours.
Um, and I feel like that's unfortunate.
Like, I feel like it would be greatthat if it wasn't on these sort of like
walled garden platforms that, uh, thatwe have to go, that, you know, might
not make the most sense to everybody.
We all just.
Threw out a bunch of differentexamples of where we might look.
Um, I feel like it would be great ifthere was like a, a digital home to,
to keep track of this information.
Of course, I'm, I'm suggesting a website.
A website should kind of, in myopinion, be the, the first place
for, for some of that information.
Um, does anybody else have thatsame experience this past Monday
trying to find opening hours forsome businesses and couldn't do it?
Well, we are going to in laterin November for our Thanksgiving.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Well, um, so that's kind of my, that's mypremise really, that like, really websites
are just still too difficult to maintain.
Um, or maybe flip that around and say, uh,these other platforms have just made it
so much easier just to update Instagram.
Instead, you take your, your, yourcamper template and throw a, a new, uh.
You know, image up there and putyour opening hours on, that's kind of
wine agrees with you.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I actually, in my notes, I say theopen web and I'm kind of not, I'm gonna
try not to use that if Dave disagrees.
Decentralized.
The web.
Exactly.
Siloed web.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Um, and so yeah, I think that if wecan't, uh, make simple opening hour
updates to our websites, how are wesupposed to expect, uh, a university
with 40 different components and ahundred different content editors and
thousands and thousands of pages to beable to make like really simple updates
when we sort of amplify that complexity,
let alone l label bee thechurch at church Lady.
You know, as a cat blotter.
Yes, exactly.
It's just, it's still just toocomplex to, to make these updates.
Um, uh, it doesn't have to be that way.
Uh, I, I have a theory or anopinion that that's just because
we have just made a. Website's toodifficult to, to update, to maintain.
And, you know, we, as in the wholecommunity, obviously, I do think that
WordPress is doing a lot in that areato make it easier, to make it better.
Um, but I still think we do needto, we still need to do more.
Um, so again, that'skind of my, my premise.
What I wanna try to convince everybodyof is to take some time to, to think
about this, um, and, and how we cansupport content editors in, in their job.
More specifically, I want to getinto kind of like w way editing.
Uh, some people might remember,uh, uh, front page, uh, as a, as a,
actually a real wizzy big editor.
Like it really was, uh, um, youknow, w big editing at its, well,
maybe not its finest, but it was, butit was, um, and more specifically,
I wanna talk about page builders.
I kind of said that already.
We, we have these great new pagebuilders and full site editors
in our open source CMSs Now.
Um, we can create full pages, dothe, the, the full header input
or everything very visually.
Um, but.
Uh.
It's still, you know, that that adds awhole bunch of additional complexity.
Um, so I wanna talk about how we cansort of solve some of these problems and
maybe offer some, some, some suggestions.
Uh, I mentioned this term wig.
Uh, a lot of people pronounce it inthat way, uh, but in case some folks
don't know what it actually means,uh, what you see is what you get.
Um, so I think Matt even mentioned it.
Uh, you know, something that we,that we use often, um, just in
case folks didn't know that one.
Um, some things that I do thinkare, are obvious wig editors.
There's the, you know, obviouslythe WordPress block editor
is a perfect example of it.
Um, Drupal Canvas.
Yeah.
I'm mentioning Drupal.
Um, uh, which was previouslycalled Experience Builder.
If anybody is sort of half in thatecosystem, uh, we have, uh, services
like Wix and Scratch Base and Webflowand all of those types of platforms.
Um, then there's the other thingsin the WordPress ecosystem too.
Elementor and Beaver Builder and Divvy andall that list could go on for a long time.
Um, and there's othersof course, out there too.
We also have text editors and I have anopinion that these are not wizzy wigs.
Uh, even though I think, I thinkI heard Matt say today reference,
uh, you know, adding Wizzywig inwhatever old version of WordPress was
sort of adding like tiny M-C-E-I-Ithink adding Wizzywig was Gutenberg.
I don't think we had Wizzywig before that.
Um, or, you know, some otherecosystems or CK editor, well I guess
we can have that in WordPress too.
Um, other editors, there's a wholebunch of them out there that you can
use that kind of do the same thing.
Um.
I don't really thinkthat's what wizzywig means.
I think, uh, wizzywig isthose, uh, those page builders.
We also have some other things thatI kind of see as more like legacy.
I like to consider legacy builders, um,a CF using it for building pages, using
it for components I feel like is kind ofa, uh, um, consider that kind of legacy.
Again, it's not W way it's.
Um, it definitely still servesits purpose, which is kind of what
I, you know, wanted to at leastpoint out that it's still useful.
Absolutely, we have to createcontent types, but I feel like, uh,
using it as a page builder, uh, isnot, is not what it's intended for.
Another ecosystem, Dr. Drupal hasall the same types of eco, uh,
things in that ecosystem as well.
So those exist everywhere as well.
Those field-based, uh, pagebuilding experiences, uh, if
anyone hadn't seen Drupal, that'sa getting sort of Drupal there.
But I like to talk to, to, to, tothink about and to use more, to use
these modern page builders, uh, thatare in core in WordPress, in Drupal.
I think it's incredibly powerful.
Uh, I think it's one of the ways we canrespond to perhaps some of the challenges
for the web today, because having.
These as being core features, uh, not aspart of a proprietary, um, you know, cloud
service I think is incredibly important.
I think this is a really importanttime, uh, for us to compete against
some of those cloud services, um,especially in, in the space that,
that, that, you know, my company thatwe usually work in higher education
and enterprise, where we do have.
Hundreds of, of people editingcontent on their websites.
Uh, it gets really challenging.
Um, uh, uh, so we can empowerthem with these open source tools.
Um,
but I still feel like, again, I've alludedto this, there's, I feel like there's a,
there's a problem with even those, thesetools that, you know, I'm saying are so.
Uh, really, really easy to use and,and, and, uh, really beneficial
to the, the web as a whole.
Um,
I think, you know, we, we, asI mentioned, we talk about a
wiziwig interface like this.
I'm not really, you know, I'm notreally sure that that's true to
the, the Wii R acronym at least.
Um, or maybe something more like this.
Still not quite.
Uh, what I would say is, is, you know,true, what you see is what you get
as you're editing this experience.
Similarly, you know, other interfaces, um.
Or even something like this, uh, in,in my opinion, this isn't, still,
isn't, you know, vis wig, even thoughthis is still using the block editor.
It's just, again, a, a setof of, um, of, of, of fields.
I kind of like to think of thismore as something like what you
see as what fill in the content onthe front end, but I don't know.
Um, it's, it's, it's overwhelming.
Right?
And that's, that's kind of the, the, the.
The ultimate point.
It's, it's not really, youknow, a true, a true wig.
Um, but when we get to the modern pagebuilders, they're still difficult as well.
And that's, that's I think the, theimportant thing to, to, to take away.
Um, there still can be very overwhelming,um, but, uh, uh, a lot, a lot is going on.
And if we look at.
You know, uh, uh, the block editorhere, if we look at this wizard editor,
um, we have a lot going on here.
We have a whole bunch of different embeds.
We have a whole bunch of differentcontrols, uh, so many color options.
Uh, do you know, do we really,really want content editors to
be adjusting their own margins ontheir pages when they're trying to.
Update opening hours or a program ofthe, of their, of their university.
Uh,
but we could, we couldsimplify it quite a bit.
We can bring it down to onlythe controls that we need.
Notice that in the sidebar here, wehave a lot fewer controls, just, uh, you
know, some visibility controls and thensome advanced controls and that's it.
Uh, and that's because we've kind ofcreated a system to, um, to give them the
features that they need and to have the.
Um, style and everythingappearing as it should.
So there's a lot less options.
And really it justhelps them do their job.
It helps people get in and get out,um, doing what they need to do and
speed up the whole workflow, justreducing the decisions that need to
be made for every, every little thing.
So that's kind of, that's kind of it.
That's the underlying problemthat I think that, that, that,
that we can, we can solve.
If we all just consider this a littlebit more, uh, we can make site builders.
We as site builders be that.
Designers or developers or even thecontent entry teams or the project
managers or anybody, uh, can takesome sort of action to help make
this a better experience for them.
Um, so in terms of, you know,why, why does it matter?
Just to sort of simplify and maybeclarify what I was just trying to say?
Um, we can, we can support the contententry team with making much more
efficient updates, um, improvingcompliance with brand guidelines,
things like typography and colors and,you know, for larger institutions,
those are very important things.
Uh, it helps to create accessiblecontent for everybody because again,
if we're, uh, being able to reduce someof those options, we don't have the,
the, the opportunity for something tohappen that's not gonna be accessible.
Um, and ultimately to go back to myoriginal sort of scenario, if, if, if
people are not feeling overwhelmed andusing their CMS, they're more likely to
make those updates that need to happen.
They're more likely to actuallysee up to date content.
So.
How do we do this?
I wanna just give some, some, some tipsand some tricks and some things that
sort of, you know, we at Evolving Webhave learned about and sort of help to
sort of spur some of this discussion.
Um, I am a background indevelopment, so I'm gonna be
talking a lot more as a development.
Uh, perspective, but I'll mentionsome other things as well.
Uh, I'm actually just gonnaskip through a bunch of these.
So, first of all, um, this isgiven to us already by using,
you know, a page builder.
We get real time previews straight away.
We don't need to worry about making yourchanges and then going into a pre preview
mode to see what it looks like, andthen going back and tweaking something.
Um,
the developers on the team can configure.
Um, themes with, uh, the theme json file.
I'm gonna show a couple things of that,if that doesn't make sense to you.
That's okay.
Um, and, and in doing that, we canreduce a lot of controls as I sort
of showed in, in my screenshot.
Um, creating style presets a reallypowerful feature of, uh, repress 6.6.
Yes.
I think, yeah, when we started to,to get, uh, um, style presets easily
able to toggle between differentstyles and section styles too.
Sorry, that was 6.6.
Yeah.
6.6 was section styles, I think.
Yeah.
Maybe been six four.
Was, was, was, uh, presetsand section styles, sorry.
Are, are applying a style to anentire grouping of blocks and all
of those same time at the same time.
Exactly.
Like completely inverting a,uh, a color com a color, uh, uh,
you know, going from a dark to alight, uh, uh, color section there.
Uh, remember body classes?
Exactly, yeah, yeah,just like body classes.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Much nicer way to do that.
Same thing.
Uh, customizing per user roles, uh,disabling some undesired features.
I'm actually gonna show,show those in a moment.
Uh, and simplifying the block sidebar.
And then lastly, um, atnative custom blocks.
I'm gonna get into those as well.
Um.
So, as I mentioned first, wedon't need a preview mode.
We're in the blockeditor, we see everything.
It's true.
What you see is what you get asyou're editing that, that content,
especially now with full site editing.
Um, if you're not sort ofexploring full site editing, I
definitely recommend doing so.
Uh, Joe Simpson had atalk yesterday, I believe.
Yes.
But he had exactly that.
Yeah.
And we call it the block editor.
Yeah.
We're
not, we're kind of retiring
full site editing.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
It's, it's a tough one 'cause I think alot of people still know him, but Yeah.
Yeah.
And block editor.
Yeah.
Is is, uh, is the, yeah,
in the interface.
It's called the site editor.
Site
editor, right.
In the interface,
although that's the site editor andthe post editor are gonna merge mm-hmm.
Over the next few releases.
That's gonna be, that'sgonna simplify a lot too.
I have to remove some confusions.
Um, so yeah, there was a sessionyesterday when the recordings are out.
I would recommend, I think it's justcalled, um, something to the effect
of like, revisit full site editing.
Yeah.
Uh, uh, my, my feeling is that it'simportant to embrace the modern tools,
important to embrace native blocks.
Important to embrace the, uh, block editoras best as you can, um, so that we can
get a core support, uh, long-term support,best compatibility with the ecosystem.
Um, something like this, youknow, this is kind of what.
What, what we've learned a little bitabout is building, uh, blocks using
these types of systems that create,um, the blocks based on fields.
Um, we, it doesn't createthe best editing experience.
You're not, it's, again,it's not a true wizzywig.
You're not seeing what that looks like.
What, as you're creating that content.
Uh, so my feeling is that we, we, thisis a great intermediary technology.
Uh, but it's still very foreignto the rest of the block editor.
So by using the block editor, using nativeblocks, taking the time to learn it if
you have to, uh, is, is uh, is the most.
And there's some great courses I'll learn.
Yeah, there's great courses.
I'll learn from a lot of people whoare actually at this conference today.
Yes.
Um, yeah, I actually have someresources at the end too that I'll,
I'll, I'll share for some of that.
Uh.
Um, you know, when we're creating a,this is an example of what a, uh, uh,
block looks like with an A CF, uh, block.
The code itself isn'tnecessarily important.
It's more of just a, an example of whatthat looks like versus if we sort of
create some of the same thing with a,uh, you know, native repress block.
It's, it's.
It's code that you have to learnto use and to understand anyway.
So it just, it makes more time, itmakes more sense to me to embrace
this, to figure out how it works to,once you do, it's incredibly powerful.
You get so much more control, uh, andthere's so much more momentum in, in, in,
in this once you get started doing it.
Uh, and then I, you know, I showeda little bit, a little bit about how
we can curate the editor experience.
I wanted to show someexamples of that as well.
Um, if we go back to, to, to thisexample of this very, you know,
uh, uh, overwhelming interface, um,there's a lot here that WebPress is
providing by default, which is great.
That's what we want.
Um, we want to have, we don't wannahave to create embeds for YouTube.
Somebody was mentioning in oneof the earlier sessions how great
that was to have, actually, Ithink it was Joe's session as well,
uh, to bring YouTube embeds in.
Uh, well, you know, we don'twanna have to do the plugin.
It's great that it's in core, butit provides so much more stuff
that maybe we don't, uh, don'tnecessarily want to have there.
Um, it's just, it's justtoo confusing in the end.
Um, there's, even if you start to searchfor a block, you'll get, uh, suggestions
for something to install, uh, youknow, a plugin to install, which is.
In theory, I think a really great ideaagain, like that, that that can be
very helpful, but it's not, um, it'sgonna again, cause more, more potential
confusion, especially when we'redealing with, you know, a large content
editing team or larger institutions.
Maybe we don't want topresent that option to 'em.
Um, it works in some cases.
Not all the cases, but you know,infinite blocks basically just creates
infinite flexi, uh, flexibility,but which increases the complexity
and just makes more decisionsmore, more, uh, more issues.
Similarly, we have this idea ofpatterns, block patterns, um.
These are a whole bunch of defaultblock patterns, uh, that, uh, can create
again, uh, a lot of really interesting,really unique, uh, pages and designs.
These are the ones thatare loaded by default.
Um, these wouldn't fit into most sites.
Uh, so, you know, removingthose core block patterns, um.
Um, again, we'll, we'll help toremove that chance of going off
brand, uh, having some accessibilityproblems so that I'm sure these
are all designed to be accessible.
Um,
and with all of this, you know, withgreat power comes great responsibility
with all this power to make anythingyou want, uh, you can obviously create
any color combinations that you want.
You know, this is just,again, core functionality.
We can create this reallyinaccessible text, um, with
really inconsistent spacing.
Just doesn't look great.
It's all around, not a, not an idealworld here for, you know, some content
editors to be, to be working on that.
Um,
and then, you know, we're also used tohaving sometimes these more structured,
controlled content types or post typesthat have all these different fields.
This is another view of, uh, of.
Of, of Drupal.
Um, we have the same thing in WordPress.
We have those components withall these different fields.
Um, but those are verylocked down, very rigid.
Um, I think, I think we'll findnowadays with things like Wix and
Squarespace that editors are lookingfor a lot more control, um, to not
have these really rigid experiences.
Um.
And so this is where now we can startto sort of pair some of this stuff back.
Uh, if we see this, you know, back tothis earlier example, there's a whole
bunch of things on this side there.
Um, that yes, provide that control andthat flexibility, but also provide,
uh, without guardrails, can providesome, some challenges in the, in the
interface, uh, and in creating content.
Um, so.
By reducing the options, we can make ita lot easier to, to make these updates.
So, with a few little bits of code thatI'm gonna both, i'll, I'll provide some
quick snippets, but also some links to, tothe actual, uh, code, uh, for, for later.
Um, you know, we see, uh, uh, a sidebarlike this with all these different
options on the, the Heading Block.
Um, we can reduce it downto just something like this.
Again, I kind of showedthis earlier, but, uh.
It makes it a lot easier to,to, to make this content.
We don't risk anybody, you know,putting in some inaccessible colors
or going off brand or just havingto make a bunch of extra decisions.
So reducing settings on buttonsor for that matter, on a bunch
of different, uh, blocks.
Um, something simpleas just the, these few.
Uh, uh, lines in the theme json file candisable a bunch of those controls, and
you can do this on a block by block basis.
Um, I have a, a code sample there thatwill sort of give you all of that.
Uh, the full, this is just a,a small piece of that file.
The full, the full, uh, file.
And similarly, we can disable thosecore patterns if we needed to, or for
that matter, disable any patterns thatmaybe we don't need, um, that might be
provided through some other methods.
Uh, just with, you know,a little bit of PHP here.
And then we can also, this, this isnow where it gets really powerful.
We can start to actuallyrestrict block settings by roles.
Uh, so if you have maybe a designeron the team that you, you want to
allow them to choose some differentcolor combinations, do some things
differently, you can do that.
Um, with just a, a little bit of, of,of JavaScript there, then you can get,
make it really powerful by adding anadditional convers, uh, additional,
um, logic in there to, to show and hidedifferent controls to different people.
And so here, you know, if we think of,uh, an editor, maybe we don't have.
Um, some of those controls there forcolor combinations, and then we have
a designer log into the exact samespot looking at the exact same block.
These are both on the button block.
Uh, and that designer might seemore controls, they might see those,
uh, those colors, text colors andbackground colors and whatnot.
Because we chest up, they're gonnabe able to, to, uh, to do that
in a, in, in a brand compliantand accessible compliance way.
That's very nice.
Yeah, it's, it's really quitegreat that we can do that.
It's, uh.
It does, it does take a bit of,you know, this, where was I here?
This is a part of that code, butthere's, uh, again, the QR code thanks to
GitHub, there's a whole bunch more thatthat can, that can be done with that.
Um, I think an important thing,part of this is to just define who's
responsible for some of this work.
Um, if we look back atthese examples here.
Of the different, uh, uh, you know, posttypes and interfaces that we create.
This is usually what developers create.
Um, because if we're thinking about howdo we, uh, have the most control over
our content model and our structureand our HTML output and we want to do
all these things, so we're not liketo thinking so much about how a user's
interacting with that, uh, we're thinkingabout what we need to think about.
Designers on the other hand, uh, muchmore natural fit for, for being involved
in some of these conversations because,um, they have more empathy for the user.
They, they're doing user testing,they're seeing how users use the website.
Um, but what they don't haveis the experience on the CMS to
know what we can and can't do.
So they need to sort of work.
Developers, of course.
Um, they don't know the differencebetween, you know, an A CF block
or a Gutenberg block or any ofthese different pieces and, and,
and how limiting they can be, um,project managers or product owners.
I just got a, a AI generatedimage that looks kind of.
Fun as AI generated images do.
Um, you know, they're developingthe user stories, uh, for how
these things should function.
Um, they're great advocates for theclient and especially when it comes
to, um, you know, the, the, the, um.
The scope of, of, of the projectand what should be involved in that.
Uh, but they don't necessarilyhave maybe the design experience
or the CMS experience.
So sort the question becomes like, who,who, who should be responsible for this?
For, for, for crafting good content editorexperiences, um, as I said, developers.
The CMS really well.
So they're great advocates andgreat, great to be involved in that.
Uh, they often build the contentmodels and the structure and
everything on the backend.
Uh, designers are, have probablythe most user, uh, empathy
for users and, uh, themselves.
Yeah,
because those are the people.
Um, you listen to Dave saymany times today and yesterday.
I'm a writer.
We need to be building for writers.
Mm-hmm.
We need to be building for editors.
Um, now I'm an idiot who happens tobe a designer, art director, developer
who is also a copywriter and an editor.
Um,
I'm also old.
There are more of me, but youknow, I have a shelf life.
Or probably 30 years left,um, on the good side.
So, but people who are writers andeditors, even if they don't have
this other experience, you know, andcertainly by default, the church ladies
and cat bloggers are content editors.
Um, they've gotta be, they,they've got to be involved and.
Should have
just as important a roleas the project managers.
They should probably bethe project managers.
Yes, absolutely.
Yeah.
The way a newspaper has a managing editor.
Yeah, no, that's, that is a great point.
Um, uh, the, the content team themselvesneed to be involved in this too.
Um, I version, uh, to shorten it.
But yeah, the content team definitely,uh, needs to be involved in this, uh,
because they are the ones that use it.
Uh, and I think the designers, Ithink one thing is like, they can
also be, uh, they, we do a lot ofuser research with our UX team.
Um, they can, they canabsolutely be involved in.
Doing user research on that, contentediting experience on the backend.
Absolutely.
Watching the users use maybe thisnew component library we've created.
Um, seeing how they're using it, seeinghow we can change it and customizing it.
Yeah.
So just to summarize the, the appointmentsthat Yeah, we need to have content editors
involved in this whole process as well,because they're the ones and driving.
Driving.
Exactly, yes.
Yeah, yeah.
They're the ones using it, so Yeah.
They need to be, theyneed to be driving it,
not just, you know, not just pat,don't just pat 'em on the head.
And say, that's nice.
You know, that's what I taught myson to say when he was totally not
interested in what I had to say
because I was tired of hearing.
I don't care about that mom.
Exactly.
So don't pat 'em on the head, you know?
Yeah.
Have them drive the
process.
Yeah.
You know, the pro project managershould, should be probably
just budget and schedule.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, and it goes back to, again, I thinkeverybody, everybody in the entire project
can be, um, involved and responsibleand taking part in this process.
Um, but that said, shut
that good job.
No, I, I said I wantedto have conversations.
This is great.
Um, yeah, so, uh.
I, I do think that we, that wouldbe also beneficial to have somebody
who is responsible for this.
The collaboration is absolutelyimportant, but, um, somebody should
still be inspo, uh, responsible for this.
Yeah.
So we as the builders, the, the, thedesigners and developers, et cetera,
we can help, uh, to, to do that, todo these, create these new interfaces.
Um, but no one, as faras I can tell right now.
Generally no one isintentionally doing that.
Uh, and I don't think many peopleare even thinking that it's something
that should be done because noone's responsible for it yet.
I think it's oftentimes it's overlooked.
So that's where I do think that
writing that into your contracts, wewill not start the project until you
assign a content editor to the team.
Interesting.
Yeah.
Want sell says our sales guy.
Um.
So, yeah, I think that,I'm sure there are better
ways to, yeah.
Yes, of course.
I think there is some, some amountof, of, of sarcasm in there.
Um, yeah.
But we, we as, as the, as, as thosepeople that are doing all of this
work need to be involved in that.
And, and this is absolutely wherethe content editors need to be
involved in this as well, advocatingfor that improved experience.
Um, I don't actually know thatwe need a new role for this.
I don't want to suggest that.
I would be happy to hear everybody's.
Yeah.
So
take whoever's gonna beapproving most of the content.
Yeah.
Have some meetings with going
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Having them in, in, in that,in that process and, and, and
owning a part of that process.
Um, but we prefer that to happen.
We need to even have an awareness thatthis is something that we can do, that
we can customize these experiences, um,
and
some, and, and peopleneed to be advocating it.
Mm-hmm.
Um, so some final suggestionsfor me from sort of a more.
Developer focus, uh, mentality is, um,for some of the designers as I was, you
know, saying earlier that we need to haveuser research happening with that backend
experience with the content editors.
Um, watch your content editors.
Going through and hunting for, trying tofind some way to do something, the same
thing that we do on the front end today.
Um, and you'll probably end up seeing morefrom that experience than you have a will
from just asking a bunch of questions.
You'll see them and, and see howthey, how they work with this content.
Um.
And, and to, to, for designers,again, to be involved in
building the editor experience.
You know, our design team is doinggreat work on their front end, but
oftentimes we don't have them involvedwhen we start to actually work on the
backend and how that experience looks.
Um, and on that note, they, theycan actually use, designers can
use that experience as well.
Um, I would love to have.
Our design team actually building a,like a, sort of like a style book page
using the components that they design,seeing how they work, experiencing the
problems that, that a content editormight, uh, experience because they're
thinking about it from a differentway than we as developers would be.
And for the content editors, you know,providing feedback, um, being involved
in the process, even owning the process,um, taking that time to advocate for
simplifying it because you don't want tohave this overwhelming experience every
time you go in to make a simple update.
Uh, reviewing the brand standards ofthese components, that's a big part
of this as well, is to make surethat it's gonna be, you know, uh,
working within your brand standards.
Um, making sure that it alignsbecause, you know, the, the
development team aren't designers.
They're not gonna be aware ofthe band standards so, so much.
Um, I'm requesting demos, uh,of that experience itself.
We do demos all the time with frontend features and, and we typically
also do it over the backend experienceas well to show off how that works.
It's a great training opportunity, butif for content editors, if maybe your
team isn't, if your development teamisn't doing that, this is the, you know,
the thing to ask for, I think they'llbe usually be pretty happy to do that.
So really quickly, just to wrap upsome of the, and summarize some of
the points, um, you know, clearlyidentifying somebody, uh, who's
responsible, um, embracing these modern,uh, new modern frameworks, simplifying
the interface, uh, where you can, um.
Performing testing on the backend itself.
Um, looking for a consistencywith that brand standards and with
accessibility, uh, and, and training,uh, using those demos as a training
opportunity, but also going beyond thatand creating training documentation
for the, for the content teams.
Um, and a couple things that I like to,to think about not doing is, you know,
using technical jargon, especially inthe interface when maybe you're providing
some helper text or something, um, youknow, your content team is probably not.
By developers.
So something for, for the, forthe developers to consider.
For sure.
Do not get me
started.
There's, yeah, exactly.
There's some, some, some feelings there.
Um, technical jargon is, is,is too difficult to understand.
Uh, an overloaded, uh, screen, uh,just causes so much decision fatigue,
um, hard hardcoded layouts, thosereally structured and rigid layouts.
Um, just create no ability to.
No flexibility over, over the long term,um, ignoring performance for admin users.
I hadn't mentioned that one previously,but, um, sometimes we see an
overwhelming interface that's alsovery slow and it just gets really
frustrating to, to use that interface.
Um, and again, the documentation,um, maybe that's my developer in
me, but I feel like documentationis so incredibly important.
So what, what's next?
What now?
I think it's just that we should befocused on building websites, building
our websites for the content editors aswell, not just for the users themselves.
Users are probably the, the,the, the front end users are,
are incredibly important.
Of course.
I don't mean to trivialize that,but we need to also consider
the content editors too.
So that's it.
Um, as I mentioned, there's,uh, all the code samples are
in a. Uh, GitHub repository.
Um, it was actually based on a, um, uh, awebinar that we did a couple months ago.
So you'll see some more in there,some more content, uh, some
more codes, some more, some moreinteresting things to look through.
Um, and if anyone had questions aboutanything in there, you know, once you
start looking through it, I'm happy toalways, uh, you know, uh, help in any way.
Uh, my email is on the first slide oryou can, uh, find me later as well.
Thank you.
Questions.
Will you make the slide today also?
Yeah, be on the work workcamp side eventually.
Well, the videos, maybe
the videos might take a little longer.
Yeah.
I've also discovered the, thecamera was turning off after
half an hour, so, oh, okay.
So you may need some truncated videos,
but word caps, videos are nightmares.
Cool.
Get them right is, uh, always a problem.
Thank you for the great presentation.
Um, I missed the beginning, soif I ask a question that you've
already covered, I apologize.
No problem.
Um, in terms of what I've seen, is thisyour suggestion or, or have you gotten
feedback that people want a simplerinterface in terms of creating content?
Um, I think it's.
I say suggestion, a feeling.
Um, but I absolutely think that, uh,uh, if we haven't gotten that direct
feedback with within, somewhere fromour clients, I think that the team
themselves when they're using it,the content teams, because you know,
we'll work with our, um, our projectmanager on the client side, uh, and
maybe not always getting to hear thatfeedback that they're seeing internally.
But I think actually I'll say weabsolutely have gotten the feedback yes.
Yeah, now that I'm talkingto her, I can remember.
So it is absolutely feedback that we get.
Uh, it's absolutely, um, uh, I thinkalso just apparent to me and a feeling
to me that it is the editor is becomingmore and more powerful and thus more
and more complex and thus more and more,you know, uh, confusing for some people
and has a non, sorry, as a non-developer,um, it was really good to see that you
can make some of these customizations.
How are you getting the word out tosomeone like me that these are possible
because I feel like want to use is what
they can do.
Power, purpose.
No, that's, that's a great question.
The question was how do, how dowe sort of get, get this, tell
people that it's possibility thatit's possible to, to do this?
Um, well me, I guess this is part of it.
Uh, as I said, we did awebinar to talk about it.
Um, uh, we sort of have wrote a,you wrote a blog post about it,
but I would also say, um, uh, NickDiego does a lot of great work.
Yeah.
And yeah, actually if you, on theGitHub, they read me, I think I have all
their resources on there and I'm prettysure like five of them are from Nick.
Yeah.
Um, he's done a lot ofgood work on, on that.
He has a, a post of exactly basicallyhow to do some of those things.
Um, so do look at that and dofind some of the resources.
Also
these posts of every plugin.
Ah,
yes.
Notes
last year came here and gavea workshop on this, actually.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
Uh, yeah.
Uh, the comment was at last year,Nick Diego was at Road Camp,
uh, Canada, and did a workshopon, on this various same thing.
Uh, have presentations on that tv.
Hopefully it was
workshop.
Yeah.
Have a little, he, he, he'sdone the talk of a as well, so
you are very a talk comment.
And I think it's partly on us asdevelopers and project leaders
when we're talking to clients.
Mm-hmm.
Part of the specifications is.
Well, you know, what's locked down?
What's features what, what styleblocks or style books mm-hmm.
We're, we're working with and you know,that's what we're getting paid to do.
Mm-hmm.
To actually guide and give it extra value.
Yeah, exactly.
I think it's very much on us to,
yeah,
to do it.
But I think with that,we'll say thank you.
Thank you.
My note says there'sgonna be a closing remark.
There's no one here to give them.
So after party or take notes next doorand see if there's any closing remarks.
Well, there might
be closing those remarks from the stairs.
I have no idea.
Let's see you one next year.
Somewhere in Canada somewhere.
Hey, Jesse.
Hey, so I'm a designer, okay?
I don't code at all.
Uh oh.
I.