content modeling

Idea: a data & content modelling UX sprint

Roy — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 01:19:16 +0000

Sub title

Who’s in?

During this weeks UX meeting we explored what it would mean to redesign the core Field UI. It’s definately in need of an update.

Currently all mashed together in a couple of tabs on Field UI:

Data modelling – Define data types and storage formats for individual fields & their relationships
Content modelling – Compiling individual fields into appropriate content (entity) types and configuring the input form for creating content items
Display modelling – Configuring different ways to display these created content items

One of the first steps towards a new and improved user interface for Field UI would be to unbraid these different types of tasks. Take it apart and put it together again in more user friendly ways.

Would be nice to kick this off with some kind of (virtual) UX design sprint, no?

Tweets starting from here

Roy — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 22:55:07 +0000

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Tweet-sized notes posted as content on yoroy.com that get pushed to Twitter via RSS and Zapier.

/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/20180219-notes-ui.png?itok=4rNLWr49

My previous post inspired Joeri to some improvements on his site. Nice!

I built another step towards POSSE this weekend: tweet-sized notes posted as content on yoroy.com that get pushed to Twitter via RSS and Zapier. Here’s how:

Create a new content type “Note”. This one needs to only have a text area. And here we run into Drupal always requiring a title. We can’t create entities without giving it a title. The title itself is always a text field, so not ideal for writing 280 char bits of text. Two contrib modules to work around this:

Auto entity label to define an automatic pattern for the title of these Notes. I set it to use a simple timestamp.
Exclude node title to actually hide the title field on the Note creation form and on display.

Next I defined a new text format that does not use CKEditor but allows tags and automatically transforms URLs into links. I set this to be the default text format for the text area on the Note using the Better Formats module (sadly currently only available as an old development release). This step is optional, it helps remove user interface clutter. This gives me a content creation form with just a single plain text text area, a “published” checkbox and a Save button.

I updated the views that list blog content on this site to also include content of type “Note” and configured a Notes RSS feed as well. I use this feed as an input on Zapier where the Notes body is extracted and posted as a tweet.

Core strengths

Roy — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 23:28:07 +0000

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“Plan and model digital products for today and tomorrow.”

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The Designing Connected Content book has arrived. “Plan and model digital products for today and tomorrow.” I have yet to dive in but I see Drupal screenshots and lists of field types like entity reference, long text (formatted), boolean, number (float), etc.

Today a content strategist collegue asked me about that list builder thing in Drupal. Show items of type x, filtered by y, sorted by x and only show fields 1, 3 and 6 of each item. And is it available for Drupal 8 as well?

Yes, that’s 1. Field UI and 2. Views module, which are both part of the Drupal core package.

We take Drupal core features for granted that other systems are still struggling with. They are also features people struggle with in Drupal because of hard to use user interfaces. I would love to see research and design work happen around how we can improve Field UI and Views UI.