The Battle for the Body Field

With Drupal's powerful content modeling tools at their disposal, most design and development teams have already converted to the gospel of structured content. Unfortunately, even the best-planned content types and presentation models fall apart when users hit the body field. Ugly ad-hoc markup creeps in, house styles evolve without planning, and critical metadata stays locked in blobs of "good enough for now" HTML.

Better HTML-focused WYSIWYG tools aren't enough, adding more and more fields to the mix only complicate editors' lives, and the principles of semantic HTML don't solve the deeper problem. The work of content modeling must extend inside the body field, not just wrap around it, and that requires a more holistic approach to the design and architecture of a Drupal site. In this session, we'll cover:

• Best practices for handling semi-structured "body field" content
• How content patterns can bring together designers, developers, and stakeholders
• Battle-tested techniques for mapping a project's "content vocabulary" 
• The latest and greatest Drupal tools for modeling flexible content
• Real-world examples of these techniques and their impact on projects