Powered by Paragraphs: Building a Better Content Model

Drupal offers many site building tools for creating robust layouts:  Panels, Blocks, Display Suite, and Panelizer, to name a few. The problem is that some tools blur the line between what’s “content” and what isn’t. The content model you create can get muddied up and fragmented if you don’t have a clear plan ahead of time. How is your content going to be searched, translated, revisioned, and exported? How many interfaces are your editors going to have to use to update a page? In this session we will make the case that the answer to your layout, content and workflow problems is one module you may not even know about - Paragraphs.

The Paragraphs module has grown in popularity in recent years because it tackles several problems at once. You can aggregate fields together like Field Collection but you can also mix and match different paragraph types in the same field. Many have argued  (and so will we), that you can throw out the old WYSIWYG body field altogether in favor of a supercharged Paragraph field. Further, Paragraphs can address layout challenges by giving editors flexibility to build out a page without learning more interfaces and without fragmenting content.

Want to know more? We’ll show you!

By the end of this session you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to simplify your content model and build awesome, flexible layouts for your users. The future is here and the future is Paragraphs!

Session Outline

• What is Paragraphs?
• Comparing Paragraphs to Field Collection
• Comparing Panelizer to Paragraphs
• How to “think” in components, not pages
• Replacing the body field with Paragraphs
• Easy theming in Twig
• Advanced examples
• Case study examples

About Our Presenters

Jay Callicott is a Director of Development for Mediacurrent and an enthusiastic Drupal developer for over 10 years. He is also the maintainer of the popular OpenChurch Drupal distribution.

Jay is an avid supporter and contributor to Drupal open source projects. Jay writes blogs on Drupal and has spoken at several Drupal events including a session on Marketing Automation at Drupalcon, Austin in 2014 and a Features-related session at NYC Camp in 2015.

Dan is a senior developer at Mediacurrent with eight years of Drupal experience. Over this time, he has contributed heavily to the Drupal Commerce and greater Drupal module ecosystem and helped launch a wide variety of Drupal-based websites and applications, including the paragraphs-based Drupal 8 build of Habitat For Humanity’s website habitat.org.