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.
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. :)
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.
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
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).
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