 Drafted. Oh, awesome. Okay. Okay. Welcome everyone. I'm excited to be Talking today about the future of content management. It's this big aspirational topic. So I hope you're ready for some big ideas and Usually I like to give talks that are really specific like here's a screenshot go into Drupal and check this checkbox It's gonna change your life. This talk is a little bit more about Ideas, so I hope you find it still helpful My name is Suzanne Degacheva for those of you who haven't met me. I'm one of the co-founders of Evolving Web. We're a Drupal agency and At Evolving Web I get to work on all kinds of different projects I've been doing sales and marketing recently and I'm also the initiative lead of promote Drupal So if you're interested in getting involved in marketing Drupal, we'll be pulling some of those ideas into this presentation but I'd love to get more people involved with that and Yeah, the evolving will be get to work with a lot of different types of clients and higher education and government Lots of institutions and also, you know bigger bigger companies And so I'll be pulling ideas from those those types of projects in my experience working on Content strategy and Drupal strategy over the years into this talk I think DrupalCon is really a great opportunity to step back and think about Drupal's position in the Bigger ecosystem, you know often when we're at our jobs when we're at our desk. We're working on a specific project We're really in the weeds So taking a step back and thinking about what role Drupal plays and what Drupal's good at How it compares to other options, but also just what makes it what makes it unique It is a really unique platform But we often think about it in terms of our own projects and maybe not so much from an outsider perspective And I think we can learn a lot just by thinking about what its strengths are and what words we use to describe it But I think about how Drupal falls into the Landscape of choices you have when you're starting out on a project, you know I think most people recognize the fact that building something from scratch when you're building a Website or an app or an online platform like this this takes a lot of time. It's an expensive option It's a huge investment and for a lot of the projects we work on, you know, it's not even something we consider But there are lots of other choices out there So we we often think about building on top of a framework which could give us a solid base of functionality But if you've ever built on top of a framework before I used to use Ruby on Rails And I found that every time I would build a new project. I'd have to think about well, how are we doing multilingual again? How does how is content moderation going to work? How are all these? content Editing interface is going to fit together and so there would be a lot of work from scratch that we would be having to build every time And for those of you who have used more like web builders like I'm thinking of Squarespace and Wix and wealth of similar platforms out there that are kind of Cheaper options they often really lower the cost But they provide so few options and so little flexibility that they're not really a viable option for organizations that value compliance and value things like accessibility so We can often rule out these options and the sweet spot of Drupal is really for organizations that see the value and more flexibility But also having a standard approach to things So what I value about the Drupal community is that you walk in and you see well Although there are many ways to do things. There's a standard approach to some really valuable core features like multilingual like how content works like the whole Form API and entity API and so there's I think more Standardization and Drupal than we sometimes give it credit for and this Standardization saves us tons of time on projects and so it kind of puts Drupal in this position of high adaptability and Well, no, I don't think we can say that Drupal is low-cost It's going to require less customization than than these other options and so on this map of Options I put Drupal, but what is the noun that we use when we talk about Drupal these days I like to think about language and I like to think about the words that we use And when I first started using Drupal, I would often use the word content management system I think we all still use that word often in our professional lives It's a useful term and When we first started using Drupal, you know, I started 15 years ago I was really talking about content management from the perspective of Okay, we want other people to be able to edit the website We don't want to just have static HTML that you know a developer or someone who knows HTML has to edit So we have this value of just having an interface for content editors But beyond that when we talk about Drupal content management in particular We're really in talking about empowering this site builder And the site builder in Drupal gets a unique amount of freedom because there's so much Configuration and so much you can do by installing modules and so there's this promise that you know There's a great deal of flexibility just in terms of the the content model of Drupal And I think this is something we shouldn't Underestimate the value of you know if you have if you've ever used other systems the content model tends to be Much less flexible so in Drupal we might take for granted the fact that we have multi-lingual we have taxonomy we have references between content and we have this really robust content Content model field ability baked into Drupal And this gives a huge advantage over more limited CMS options So CMS but CMS plus and when I started You know having to sell Drupal to organizations. I found myself often wanting to use this word platform Do you use the word platform a lot? It's a great word It's kind of kind of general people don't know always know exactly what you mean But when I talk about Drupal and I use the word platform I'm often trying to communicate the fact that it does more than content management It's a starting point because it can integrate with other systems It can integrate with other content it goes beyond this base of content model and content authoring that we that we That we always use and so for example you can extend Drupal's form system You can extend authentication, right? You can integrate with your own authentication system you can totally transform the search interface and make it something much more powerful and I think really highly valuable you have all these integrations that are really tightly related to the content and That's something that's a really key nuance So when we're adding functionality on top of Drupal we can always say well I want to add this functionality directly into the content model that I created with Drupal so the tight integration for example with Migrations can maybe you have continuous migrations running on your site or maybe you have Really unique publishing workflows that you want to handle and so that all this means that Drupal does more than just allow you to manage content heavy sites and this distinguishes it from lots of other platforms you might be using like like WordPress or other basic CMS's and I think five to ten years ago For most of the time I've been using Drupal. I've been talking about Drupal to People in IT, you know technical decision-makers and they're really they tend to be sold if you sell it right on this concept of Drupal as a platform because they value this kind of CMS plus this type of integration that we can do with Drupal But these days I don't know how many of you think you talk a lot to technical decision-makers When you're selling a project maybe more of you are talking to marketing decision-makers Maybe some of you aren't selling Drupal, which is Which is nice so so I think these these features of Drupal as a platform it's still really compelling but These days we often it's not often not enough and a lot of us these days are are dealing with More competition in the content management space and we're starting to see Drupal referred to as a DXP or a digital experience platform And we know that Folks that bigger organizations really like to use this word. It's a nice talking point. It's something bigger that we can try and sell But what does it all mean? What does it imply? What does? digital experience platform really really mean and what does it mean for Drupal So I think that just the fact that it uses the word Platform experience it's implied it's implying that we are creating more than websites and Website itself has become kind of this word that we shy away from using like somehow if I'm if I'm redesigning the Drupal.org home page Which is a project? Near and dear to my heart I think I would not want to be using the word website because that's not so inspiring to people people think beyond their websites They're thinking of you know, how do I? Create something that checks all the checkboxes. I want marketing automation. I want personalization multi-channel experience content distribution I want to have a CRM that's integrated and I want to be able to do Auditing and reporting of my content to see how successful it is I want the analytics to be built in and these are things that marketers tend to think of And they a marketers tend to have this laundry list of here's all the things I want and they might not even think of Website as you know, the most important part of their digital presence. They're just thinking of how do I talk to? Customers, how do I build my funnels? Website is just one of these these tools that they want to they want to have built out And so I think that when we talk about Drupal as a DXP The challenge is that there's not just one way to Build all these things. There's not just one CRM that you integrate with Drupal or one type of analytics tool The the real benefit of Drupal is that you can integrate it with so many different types of tools And when we pitch Drupal, I think often we say oh, it's up to you You know, you can you can integrate with whatever you want Drupal's an open platform and of course, that's true But it also leads to this uncertainty. Well, what am I you know, what am I gonna get? It's harder to market something that's so flexible and and not as defined And so from a marketing perspective, I think Drupal starts to lose ground when the DXP conversation comes in It's harder like I said, it's harder to pitch it's harder to create demos or documentation because we have so many different options and The options really that are appropriate differ from project to project So I think what could be valuable for for us Whether we're building Drupal Projects whether we are selling Drupal Whatever our role is. I think thinking beyond this DXP term, which is kind of limiting actually I really like to use the the term content strategy a lot and to think about Drupal as a content strategy platform And I think that this emphasizes a bit more Drupal's Unique selling points in terms of having a great content model that's so flexible and so robust out of the box So if we talk about Drupal as a content strategy platform, I think it's it's easier for everybody to Talk about it's the features that Make it great for content strategy and for us all to be telling the same story So to me Drupal's strongest unique selling point it's the fact that it provides so much flexibility in terms of content authoring content modeling and Building functionality and integrations on top of that content So here's what that means to me content strategy platform like What is it here that we're actually talking about? so I think that With Drupal it's pretty easy to build something that addresses all of these needs You know a platform that's organized around user needs Messaging that could be adapted Content that can be integrated content that's portable and content that has Compliance built in Because with Drupal we can handle things so granularly so we can make sure that our content is accessible and that it complies with our brand So there's lots of things that as an organization we can do And I'm gonna talk through a few of these So first I think content strategy a content strategy platform the primary audience is Who it's the content editors? So if we really want content Content to be the priority What we're building is not a Website that's gonna stay the same always because our content strategy is gonna change all the time But Drupal can handle that because it's got this flexible content model. It has site-building tools and so And so it's gonna be it's gonna be a great platform for this and for content editors That means that we need to be providing them an interface that they like Tools for creating content that actually complies and then also an awareness of how that content is gonna be used on the platform and When we say platform, you know, it could be content that's used in many different places and for teams of communicators. I think We want them to have this certain type of independence that they get When we build them something with Drupal So content editors have all kinds of needs. I know there's probably been sessions at this conference about content editor experience. Maybe some of you have gone to the JIN Session maybe it's later today. I'm not sure exactly when it is But there's lots of discussion around and lots of priority being put on making Drupal more user-friendly for content editors and I think that It's different for each project what user-friendly means because some projects have really complex content models and some have very basic But we can kind of divide content editor needs into different categories And at the at a baseline, you know as a content editor, you don't want to be overwhelmed You don't want to encounter an interface. That's just confusing and doesn't speak your language so there's a base baseline for just what the UI feels like and Of course, the new claro theme goes a long way to the new claro theme the claro theme That's now the default in Drupal Gives us a good baseline for this Publishing workflows depending on the project lots of different requirements. So we might have here around translation or Change tracking or other approval workflows Content compliance always has to be part of the picture That's gonna look different depending on what the content actually is and then flexibility So as an added layer on the cake, of course now we have lots of ways in Drupal of you know Using paragraphs using layout builder to add a certain degree of flexibility That we might need for certain types of content And in general the goal is to have the less separation between content experts and users so Getting content experts actually involved in conversations about what should this website do? That's gonna be really valuable So what makes Drupal a great content strategy platform in particular like you talked about a lot of needs But I think it's just this ability to Adapt the UI to your go to to the content strategy that you have I think when people are Planning out projects they often let the technology lead so you often think like okay We have a new project we really want to use layout builder for that project We're gonna go all in and give tons of flexibility because that's what Drupal's good at or Okay, we have We have a desire to use decoupled Drupal. So we're gonna let that lead and we're gonna Follow that and Use all the shiny new tools Sometimes I think people get excited about things like Personalization or marketing automation and then they lead they let that lead the project like oh, how are we gonna make sure that? this content is really You know customized for every audience Instead I think it's important to start with the content strategy and in particular Content governance so for those of you who have never thought about governance before governance is like when you take all those content Structures that you built in out in Drupal and you decide who's actually responsible for these things and how often do they have to get updated and Why are we building a website in the first place? And if we have a thousand websites, you know Why do we have a thousand and who gets to decide when we create a new one? So if you start with that And let that kind of guide the what the content editing experiences and what the workflows are It's gonna lead to better results and that of course is What Drupal's great at doing? So Drupal has a great deal of flexibility in all these areas and then in terms of standardization This is kind of the counterpoint to flexibility. We can provide so much flexibility to content editors that they Don't really know Where to start they might end up with so many options that they don't know how to make the website comply with your brand They aren't sure how? accessibility Requirements should be met and so we also need to make sure that when we're building out a platform in Drupal that we as the platform providers are taking responsibility for compliance and If you have many sites, of course providing standardization across those sites is also going to be helpful and Drupal also does a great job of this, right? Providing things like Themes and content components and modules that we can reuse from site to site. I'm excited about the new recipes Initiatives the recipes and distributions because I think it's going to make some of this reuse of things like content components Easier Okay, so this I paint this picture of yeah Drupal is great for your content strategy platform And just do content strategy and it'll all be great But this is the fun part of the presentation where I talk about what's hard and what you can actually do next So the hard part so I think One one hard part is that Flexible when we talk about flexibility We might be thinking about Drupal from the perspective of being a Drupal developer when you can go in and change everything and you can You know you can add new content types and install new modules But the first from the perspective of non developers Drupal doesn't always feel flexible and so figuring out the governance for who can make changes and Making sure people are empowered. This is actually harder than it seems Customizing the content editing UI and moderation workflows this actually takes time a lot of projects don't budget for this And so then we don't end up with the results we expect and It's easy and Drupal to add lots of things like I want to add a million Moderation states I'm going to install all these modules and I'm going to add you know 35 paragraph types Then you know we are using that flexibility, but we lose a lot on the consistency side And with page building tools it can be very tempting to just provide an infinite number of options and Then content editor is actually well. They might be empowered. They also get really overwhelmed Standardization I mentioned earlier on that Drupal strength as a As a platform is that it provides a standard way to do a lot of things like multilingual like taxonomy But at the same time, of course, we all know in Drupal that there's many ways to do things We have this choice on projects now between paragraphs and layout builder And you might have two sites that you're running for the same organization that use different techniques and Standardizing retroactively when you realize this would be helpful for content editors. This is really hard And then when new challenges come up on a project like personalization We often say oh, yeah, of course Drupal can do this We're gonna personalize all of this for different types of audiences all this content. We're creating This can end up with this can lead to a lot of duplicate content That could be very hard to manage And then finally the last challenge is legacy content So who here is working on a a website that's like more than ten years old like you have content for more than ten years ago So if you have a significant amount of content for more than ten years ago It's likely that you have content that hasn't been updated where you haven't had a chance to go in and refresh that You haven't had a chance to make it make sure it's accessible or make sure that it actually Fits into your new content strategy or your new content governance model So it can be great to think about content strategy for all your new stuff, but going back and applying that to older content Tends to be a challenge So what are a few things you can go back and just start doing? On Monday Because yeah, lots of hot pie in the sky ideas First of all getting content experts involved. This is often an easy thing to do if you have a new project to revamp part of your website to build out a Micro site or you know any opportunity to kind of start start some new thing thinking and get some new ideas going Involving content experts involving people who know the content well either as content editors or as subject matter experts This is going to help prioritize the needs of content and the needs of those actual users Yeah, often they're the ones who understand it the best Documentation I know documentation is often. Oh, we have yeah, we have a we have documentation We have a manual somewhere that explains how to use this this website But I find that documentation is often written from more of a technical point of view we often tell people Oh, yeah, if you want to create this type of content Here's the steps to do it and here's all the fields to fill in and here's how they work and we do a great job of that But what I see very rarely is documentation that actually explains Well, here's five content types Here's why you would pick which one and if you have all these components that you provide as part of like a page building experience Like paragraph types block types. Here's examples of why you would use each one and here's how to make sure that you have the right balance of text and images And here's how they should actually Go about helping you communicate what you want to communicate so using real examples with real content That apply to the organization you're building for This is something rare, but incredibly valuable I'm prioritizing content governance So It's great to go in and say here's what we want the website to look like Here's the information architecture that supports that that's all great, but If you don't make a plan for how is this content all going to be kept up to date Who's responsible how often should they be going in and looking at it and what defines success for each type of content? then You're almost guaranteed that you'll have to come back in a few years to refresh because the site will not Will not keep its content strategy over time So if you're investing in content strategy at all you should be also spending a bit of time on content governance and Investing in cleaning up legacy content you don't have to wait for a big huge migration to do this and in fact now in the Drupal community we have You know a transition from Drupal 9 to 10. That's very smooth. We don't have to migrate our content anymore From one one version to another And this is fantastic news, but it also means that there's nothing necessarily to prompt us to say Oh, well, we should really go in and look at all of our legacy content and clean it up So taking the time, you know iteratively to go back and saying oh, yeah, we do have a lot of content that's We've never we haven't looked at in in years Taking the time to address the The outdated content that you surely have This is going to be a valuable use of time and not something that you have to wait for a big project to do something You can start figuring out So those are lots of next steps that we can do on our projects, but what are some next steps for Drupal? So this is what I'm going to close with I Think that there's lots that the Drupal community is doing to make Drupal an even better Platform for content strategy. This is a priority that I've seen, you know in the last few years that But that's relatively new in Drupal which is very exciting So I think there's a lot we can do on two fronts First of all the content editor experience in Drupal of course is a lot that we do from project to project to Customize that experience for the content of the project and the users of the platform but in general, I think Drupal can do a better job of providing default that defaults for content editors that actually say Content editors are the primary audience. So maybe that we need to reconsider the labels we're using or the types of Interfaces we're providing by default and This can just be as simple as the language that content editors see sometimes think small things like editing a block The content of a block using the layout builder you see the word configure instead of the word edit and small changes like this could really help content editors feel more like They're the ones that are the primary users Things like creating a toolbar an admin toolbar that's optimized for content editor The content editor experience rather than the site builder experience and then improving Features that content editors really value like preview adding things like autosave Of course, these are things we can improve on our individual projects But making them work better in Drupal as a whole. I think we'll we'll really benefit everyone And then the other idea is How can we draw the line between content and configuration? So I Think going back to the first part of my presentation. I was talking about oh Drupal was you know belt is this great CMS it has this promise that site builders can go in and Do great things in Drupal But I think it's hard for people to see hard for content editors and hard for site builders as well To see what's the difference between content and configuration? I go in and I added a vocabulary I go in and I added a taxonomy term. I added a menu item. I Update a permission and I sort of lose track of did I update the content of this website or did I update the configuration? And showing users the difference between those two things in the admin UI So it's really transparent. When am I updating the platform and when am I updating the content of my website? I Think this that just making this clear could help and help remove Remove some barriers for the what content what site builders can do And there's already barriers being removed for site builders every day, right? We saw in the strategic initiatives presentation on Tuesday all the great work that's being done on automatic updates and project browser and this is of course removing barriers for site builders Every day, but I think we just need to make things a bit more transparent So you can see am I updating the content? Am I updating the the platform? So hopefully these are things we can all work on together and develop some best practices for So a couple Last things a belt evolving web Offers Drupal training. I just wanted to give a quick plug. We have a lot of tracks that we offer We offer this as part of the discovered Drupal program that the Drupal Association runs and we also offer our training program to everyone so We have professional courses you can sign up for lots of different tracks and courses available So if you're interested at all in training up your team or getting training for yourself Feel free to come and chat with me And of course, I'd also love to chat with you about anything related to marketing Drupal Any of the topics I've kind of talked about today. So there's lots of ways to stay in touch And I think we have Time left for questions. So if you have comments or questions, we have a mic here My question is about legacy content as an agency We don't often Manage the content ourselves It's often the client So we would like them to manage their legacy content to reduce lots of problems, but We cannot How do we push them maybe to do do you have recommendations about this? Yeah, it's a great question So one thing we've done because this is often the case on our projects as well where we don't have a mandate to actually Do the content rewriting or editing ourselves? And I find it really useful to just provide some tools for the client like here's a spreadsheet that provides a list of the priority content maybe organized by how Like the most visited pages for example or the pages that are most high priority in the in the information architecture and Here's the status to help them kind of track Is it like like doesn't need updating doesn't need updating in terms of SEO or accessibility or Just getting the content model fitting more with the brand like Do you need to convert HTML to to the the fields or content components? And just having a spreadsheet to kind of track that progress and who's responsible and then giving that to them as a template that they can start to use and Monitor progress because often There's going to be some stakeholder who just wants to see the big number like oh we we updated 300 pages and improve them in this way or we made this much progress with our SEO so it can help with that kind of success tracking So you mean you would export The pages or the contents into spreadsheets You could you could export there you could use Some tool to just export them from Drupal. You could also use a tool like screaming frog to create a report kind of depends on what What why don't you use Drupal? Well, for example, if you're doing it as you're redesigning the site and maybe the site is not in Drupal yet There could be reasons to use another tool Yeah How do you see the convergence of a communication strategy with the content strategy? So I know that oftentimes that's done more on the client side internally but what's your experience of how to support your clients with communication strategy and then translate that into Content strategy. Yeah, that's a great question. So often when we're doing Discovery for a project if we're doing content strategy We'll have workshops that we run around, you know, who are the audiences we're speaking to What should the tone and voice be? What's our assessment of the existing content and Often we're doing that work to directly Improve the content of the website. We're thinking about the web content and the content strategy there But often our findings around tone and voice or around even things like content governance What content should be updated frequently often that leads into insights for the larger communication strategy like here's some Student testimonials on our website and every time we refresh these we should also take advantage and put those up on social media so I think I think you can Provide some findings that could be useful for both and like sharing that Information more broadly with the client's communications team is going to be really valuable All right, if not, thank you Suzanne. Great talk