name: Rethinking Copy Docs class: middle, center
??? I've been brainstorming and dogfooding new ways to avoid using Word with George Alexander for a while. Turns out George finds his current toolset woefully inadequate and I agree.
Let’s rethink content with that in mind.
- Automation
- Well structured
??? George would like the awesome power of change tracking. The half-baked version of this in Word doesn't do what he needs (eg reject changes that he doesn't agree with easily). Also, word lacks tools to describe the intent of bits of content. This results in a lot of meta data being written to communicate how certain bits of copy should be displayed. This gets even worse we we start thinking about copy that is hidden and revealed based on some sort of logic.
- Last minute changes have developers spend time copy/paste instead of writing code
- Ambiguous content strategy (where does this text go?)
??? A client, that shall remain nameless, ran content by thier legal team the day before the code was scheduled to be delivered. There were many changes made via Word. That product did not ship on time.
- Many small text documents instead of one monolith (fine for simpler projects)
- InDesign
- Contentful
- A CMS
??? Anything that I can import via a command line script is ok by me.
- A directory of many small text files can become cumbersome
- Flat file directory strategy wants to be loosely based on creative
- Project the used this process
??? This is great for simple projects. It's simply no panacea. For complicated projects, this is not enough.
??? This can be as complicated as we like. InDesign is good at cranking out xml. The problem is we basically build a CMS structure based on the assumption that content editors will respect policies that we can't enforce. If everyone stays on the happy path, we're good. The addition of inCopy to the mix would help help, but this process feels a bit wrong since we don't have an abundance of people that are very familair with InDesign
- Start with a minimum viable cms
- Evolve the CMS around the content needs as they arise
??? If we need to start from the begining with respect to training, why not build exactly what we want and train content editor to use that? I put together a quick demo in a couple of hours to show George a sensible Drupal configuration and explained the various metaphors of content types and how fields can be added.
class: middle, center