Particle Theory & the Digital Newsroom—Content & Pattern Design

WGBH Boston is one of the best-known and largest contributors to public television and radio in the US. When Isovera was brought on to build their digital newsroom, we knew it had to be more than just an average content site. This would be a platform for public media that had to support independent journalism at the highest level. The site had to support over 50 active content authors publishing new content virtually around the clock, with features like auto-save, change tracking, approval workflows and scheduling. And that doesn’t get into the content structure and creation process. Speaking of which, the authoring experience had to support digital storytelling in the most fluid, natural way possible.

Based on ideas like the New York Times R&D Lab’s ‘Particle’ approach (that’s Parts of Articles—get it?), Isovera developed a unique approach leveraging the Paragraphs (er, ‘Particles’ anyone?) module and a custom extension to create a content model and authoring experience like no other. An extensible list of content patterns (think images, text, slideshows, videos, tweet embeds, etc) can be easily added with a contextual popup right in a standard rich-text editor. Behind the scenes, the library of Paragraph Bundles keeps content well-structured, ensuring that the resulting story is consistently styled, well-structured and responsive as all get-out.

The resulting component-based content model is the perfect complement to the integrated design pattern library and style guide (based in Zen and KSS). This approach even bridges between the design components and the theme layer, where Sass and template partials are broken out by type. That keeps the theme aligned with the design and build concepts—all done long before Pattern Lab and Drupal 8 started hanging out in the cool kids corner.

Attendees will come away with an in-depth look at:

• Strategies and implementation tips for large-scale multi-author workflows
• Component-based design and theme insights
• A look at the Paragraphs authoring experience extension, and see where it’s headed for D8