Component-driven Content Strategy for doctorswithoutborders.org

As a content strategist or site builder/architect, you may have come across some serious CMS bloat in your career––like a Drupal website with three times the number of content types it needs, or a dozen taxonomy vocabularies that rarely get used.

In this session, we’ll look at strategies to fight that bloat by designing elegant and flexible content models with smaller chunks of structured content.

We’ll discuss how a modular, component-driven approach yields a better content authoring experience and a much less repetitive approach to site building, theming, and site maintenance.  

Thorugh a case study of doctorswithoutborders.org, we’ll show how modules like Paragraphs and D8’s fieldable blocks, when paired with an atomic design approach to the front end, allow site builders to solve edge cases in the content structure at a “lower”, more molecular level, without adding technical debt or complexity.

We’ll show how we reduced the number of node and taxonomy bundles from 50 to less than 10 for doctorswithoutborders.org, during a D7 to D8 redesign, while increasing the flexibility and maintainability of the content and codebase. 

Finally, we’ll demo the role of a living style guide like Pattern Lab can facilitate easier iterations and documentation of the content structure.