Getting content guidelines into Drupal 8

Eileen Webb wrote an article called "Training the CMS", published in the A List Apart 407th issue, that begins that way:

Nothing brings content modeling to life like launching a shiny new site: teasers fit neatly without any awkward ellipses, images are cropped perfectly for different screen sizes, related content is wonderfully relevant. The content strategy comes to life, and all is right with the world.

But for years, my joy was short lived—because it would only take a couple weeks for things to begin to fall apart: teasers would stop teasing, an image would get scaled oddly, and—I won’t lie—I’d even start seeing “click here” links.
“Why are you messing this up?” I’d wonder. The content was perfectly modeled. The CMS was carefully built to reflect that model. I even wrote a detailed training document!

In my mind, I saw authors printing out my instructions and lovingly taping them to the side of their screen. In the real world, they skimmed the document once, then never opened it again. When new staff was hired, no one remembered to tell them a content guide even existed.

The problem? I’d spent months neck-deep in the content model, and knew exactly how important those guidelines were. But the authors didn’t. For most of them, it was their first time breaking content into its component parts and building it for reuse. It’s not surprising they were fumbling their way through the CMS: misusing fields, putting formatting where they shouldn’t, and uploading images that clashed with the design.

Maybe you’re like me: you know what needs to happen in the CMS to create the experience everyone’s bought into on the front end, but you’ve found there’s a big difference between having a plan and actually getting people to execute it in their daily work. The results are frustrating and demoralizing—both for you and for the authors you’re trying to help.

Don’t despair. There’s a better way to get your content guidelines adopted in the real world: put them right where they’re needed, in the CMS itself.

There are a lot of improvements in the authoring experience of the new and shiny version of Drupal.

During the session attendees will learn what's the better way to use them to get the adoption of your content guidelines by applying the Eileen tips.

For the more advanced users, we will show how to use the new Tour API with which we can further improve the experience of the authors easily.