It has been about a month since DrupalCon in Portland, and its taken about that much time for us to decompress and catch up. As usual, the trip was worth it, even though it rained the entire time. Portland is a great city, and Powell's multi-level bookstore was a treat I'd like to repeat sometime. But on to the meat of why we were there...
Drupal 8
It kicked off with a great keynote by Dries (the benevolent dictator of the Drupal project), talking about the state of Drupal 8, set to release later this year. Drupal is in a great place to take advantage of the new reality of the web, of putting the right content in the right place, at the right time. Personalization.
How important is personalizting your user's experience. Netflix offered a one million dollar prize just to slightly improve their recommendation engine. Amazon's growth is fueled, in large part, by their recommendations.
How can content be presonalized? Iceland Air does a good job. Based on a user's search and path to their website, they have preselected options, and images of their desired destination. That is a great user experience that helps eliminate friction.
Other ways:
- Geography
- Past behavior
- intent
- device
- time of day
- temperature
A single CMS cannot do it all. It needs to be flexible and fluid enough to integrate with a variety of "best-in-class" third party services. Marketing automation, conversion optimization tools, analytics packages, and many more.
A CMS can't just be about manageing content. It has to manage the entire user experience, especially the mobile experience. But how great would it be for a company to manage the content of their website, their mobile app, and the digital signage that is displayed in their stores - all in one place. These days, its all connected and related. And these days, it's often a pain to manage.
Drupal, with its core apprach, is poised to offer these types of capabilities. It's already been done, in many ways. This has some fascinating implication for ecommerce sites that are powered with Drupal, with great opportunities to build loyalty.
The Importance of Content Planning and Architecture
While there were many good sessions that we learned from and appreciated, the biggest takaway we had from the conference was a renewed discovery of the importance on content. This should be obvious, but oftentimes in a project, content planning is an afterthought and not the driving force behind design choices. It's thrown in like extra salt to a recipe, and not treated as a core ingredient.
Two sessions really stood out in this regard: the keynote by Karen McGrane on future-proofing content and the one on Content Strategy RPG by Relly Annett-Baker.
To future-proof your content, it must be completely separated from presentation. You won't know how your content is going to be consumed at some later date (or at least how people will want to consume it), so try not to make decisions on how it is formatted based on the assumptions of today. We need to break out of the page-based mindset.
- Separate what the content means from what it looks like. What if there were not visual cues? Would it still make sense? Get semantic. Think about metadata.
- One goal - create once and publish everywhere.
- Give content creators what they need, which isn't necessarily what they ask for. This requires some more effort.
- What is the message?
- Who is responsible?
- What are the dependencies?
- What is the call to action?
- And the most important - why is it there? What is the point?
- Accessible
- Searchable - don't neglect internal search
- Findable
- Desirable
- Shareable
- Self Aware - pay attention to internal linking and tagging
- Flexible
- Portable
We Helped Build Drupal 8!
We ended it by participating in the code sprint, where Brandon and I contributed a collective four patches to Drupal core. I've done some contributed modules, but had never contributed to core. Now I have, and it feels great. When Drupal 8 is released, we will be able to point to it, and honestly say that we helped build it.
Food Tip
And if you are ever in Portland in need of a great meal, stop by the Red Star Tavern, and get their brisket. One of the best things that has ever touched my tongue. Like butter is to bread, this meat was to the entire night. Truly fantastic.
