This initiative attempts to integrate a visual editing experience into core.
It proposes a way to combine the structured data approach of Drupal with drag&drop content authoring capabilities.
In his state of drupal presentation at DrupalCon Amsterdam Dries Buytaert outlined a major challenge that Drupal is facing while extending it's reach: Beginners are struggling with Drupal. Following this result of Acquia's UX study, he proposes a strategic track ("prioritizing the beginner experience") and the "WYSIWYG initiative".
The step learning curve of Drupal's structured data approach limits it's reach beyond the technical community. While initiative's like layout builder initiative are great first steps to limit the amount of code needed to implement a website, Drupal still falls short of providing fully graphical way to handle template and content.
While this can be achieved via several variations and extensions of WYSIWYG editors based on text fields, they all lack the the integration with Drupal's strucured approach to data and content.
I propose to integrate a visual editing module into core. The module should provide a editing experience using drag and drop elements, work within the frontend theme (advanced WYSIWYG) and store data structured to be reused among other parts of the website.
Part of a great beginners experience, especially for non-coding communities, is the ability to quickly reach a deployable, manageable and good looking website. A graphical user interface to quickly create and deploy landing pages would greatly increase the reach of Drupal and allow beginners and advanced users to implement great pages quickly and also reduce the complexity of dealing with frontend templating.
The initiative has a group here: https://groups.drupal.org/content-authoring-initiative
Major discussions should be happening in the group and summaries can be posted to this issue.
As there is a possible implementation at https://www.drupal.org/project/pagedesigner → , this could at a later time directly be integrated as an experimental module.
A very rough (and ambitious) roadmap may look like this:
The roadmap is to refined after initial feedback.
This initiative is not dealing with:
The Gutenberg module provides a similar user experience, although it does not integrate with Drupal's structured data and workflow.
To be extended.
TBD
There is a contributed modules providing this functionality.
TBD
TBD
TBD
Closed: outdated
Idea
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It's likely this issue predates Contrib.social: some issue and comment data are missing.
Thanks for proposing, this is a great idea of course. It took a few years but it has come together in the Experience Builder initiative → , which pretty much maps onto this exactly.
The issue statuses don't really map that well to ideas but I've marked this as Closed (outdated) since it ended up being done elsewhere. Please feel free to update to a different status if appropriate.