 Okay, so I speak a lot, but I still feel like I need some notes, so forgive me if I have my iPhone out. We are going to rock and roll. So the title of our talk is How to Stop Editing at Google Docs and Other Tidbits to help you find the right editorial workflow. Our goal is that you walk away inspired by the possibilities of being able to perform your editorial workflow through the WordPress dashboard through custom development. And now some fun introductions. So hello. My name is Shada Tarabi. I'm the director of marketing at WebDev Studios. I oversee our four brands, which is WebDev Studios, eWebscapes, Maintain, and Pluginize. I've also been a WordPress user for over a decade, and previously before WebDev I was with a managed WordPress host for the past six years, and I currently am a lifestyle blogger in my own time. My name is Jodi Rachele. I work as director of client strategy at WebDev Studios. I've been with WebDev Studios now for two years coming from another agency prior to that. I was actually introduced to WordPress in 2006 by my husband because he needed a website. And I came downstairs one day on a Saturday, and he had downloaded GIMP and some tutorials. And he said, can you figure this out? And at the time I was really frustrated that I had to do it. But here we are 12 years later, and it's now my profession, so I guess I should be thanking him. But I didn't know it at the time. I didn't know that I would end up in this career. And I have to tell you that the primary function of my position is really to work with clients to find out about the challenges that they're having, the struggles that they may be having, the pain points that they have within their business themselves, and then hopefully offer solutions that will work for them. I will also say that I'm a terrible slide maker, so Shada helped did most of them, and it really should be two C's in that Twitter name. Oh, yeah. Spell, not my marketing forte. Yeah. So I just wanted to point that out. But thank you for having us. I really also want to thank the organizers, the volunteers for your hard work. I know how hard it is, and this has been amazing. That boat tour last night, I mean, that in and of itself. That was pretty fantastic, so thank you. This is also our first word camp for publishers. I'm curious in the audience, obviously this is the second year, whose first time is this as well. Okay, awesome. Good crowd. Hopefully you'll glean some fun things that we're about to share with you, and we'll all go on this ride together. Okay, so we all know how beneficial the open web is, and as a byproduct of that, the benefits of building your website on WordPress can yield. You own your content, you have endless plugins to extend your site, plus it's adopted by over 30% of the web. This number has been since updated, since I published this, it is not 31.5% of the web. And so we spend so much time talking about what your site should look like and not a lot about how it will function for your team of editors, writers and producers. Efficiency is something we all strive for, and thankfully we've learned a thing or two, having built sites for media clients and publishers of all shapes and sizes. And we've learned that as a publisher, you want to enable your writers and editors to work as efficiently as possible. If you're lost in the sea of endless tools organizing your editorial content while trying to adhere to your editorial workflow, then this talk is for you. Use WordPress to consolidate your workflow into one organized space. So this slide is to reflect the grandness that WordPress is. Like I mentioned, just in the past couple days, the number has increased by 0.1% of a percent. The rate in which WordPress is being adopted is exponentially growing. And I think that has a lot to do with the power of the web to create more content creators. Obviously, you all represent the spectrum of the web from small to large publishers and everything in between, and I personally believe that the web is unleashing more opportunities for content creators. And WordPress is the enabler in that. It's allowing people to go online and build their brands, and as a result it's requiring those of us who work in the WordPress space to be reactive to that and help make sure that they can publish news quickly and break stories in the way that is intuitive to the tools that we're leveraging today. I think someone mentioned in one of their talks yesterday, and it's also just kind of like a fact now when you're living in 2018, I by no means am a journalist. I by no means am paid to create content. However, I have a smartphone, and as a result of having a smartphone, that enables me to be able to take a picture of something, publish it to the web, and instantly have a reaction from whoever is paying attention, whether you're leveraging hashtags or your follower count or anything like that. And so I think as the web is continuing to grow into more and more of that type of environment, businesses like us, businesses and brands like y'all are having to be reactive to that. And so this talk is to help inspire the possibilities of being able to leverage WordPress to enable and power that number to continue to grow. And so the number on below it is 14.7% of the top 100 websites in the world today are on WordPress. So again, a really big fraction of that is to show the testament that WordPress is a great publishing platform, but what you continue to do on WordPress and how you enable that needs to be challenged. And so these are some of the big brands that are on WordPress today. I think a lot of these are popping up in articles and blog posts that you might have come across just kind of exploring the web and reading these article tidbits as they come up. But there's one on here that I really wanted to kind of emphasize just to kind of further enhance my point from the previous slide and that's Betches. I don't know if y'all have heard of Betches. If anybody's familiar with it in the audience, it is a seven, eight-year-old blog started by three women with $1,500. It is essentially a pop culture millennial satire website. They have now turned into a multi-million dollar business. And so I think that again just shows people can go online and they can create their own environment to publish news and create content. And it's happening within the snap of a button. I mean, think of all the people who right now in this room can go online and create a WordPress website. What are you doing with that power? And then as a result, what are you doing with those tools that exist today? And what are the tools that could exist tomorrow? And so current challenges, it's difficult to find a central place for all your tools to exist. There's multiple levels to the editorial workflow process. And out of the current solutions, which one is going to ultimately be the right one for you and your team? Things are happening offline and online and depending on the size of your team could be spanning over multiple time zones. And worst of all, your solution, I bet, is a Frankenstein. Made up of bits and pieces of different platforms to try to get you what you want. And so I was recently at a conference last weekend in Los Angeles and it was a media conference and I had the privilege of sitting across from some women from E-News Network. I don't know if y'all follow E-News Network. But they were sharing a story with me that I thought was really interesting and so I wanted to share that story with y'all. They basically were walking me through their editorial, other editorial, sorry, just their publishing process in general. How they're leveraging their website today, what are their pain points, what are their challenges? And they were saying essentially that they, in their particular situation, inherited a solution and it was not on WordPress. And while they thought that WordPress was a great solution, they were unable to leverage it because that was something that they had just inherited as people on this team who were having to act out and play out what they were given essentially. And so I think the flip side of that coin is maybe you are an advocate for WordPress, but maybe your organization isn't today. And so knowing that all these different solutions exist in the marketplace, but realizing that it takes a lot of people to stand up and challenge and say, hey, we expect something better for the web. We expect better tools to exist. It shouldn't have to be a Frankenstein type solution. But unfortunately, today it is. And so hopefully, through what Jodi and I walked through, you'll be able to see that WordPress as a true content management platform can also give you that editorial workflow freedom. That is unique to how you're publishing and creating content and enabling your writers and content creators to do what they do best. That way, ultimately, you can break the news as fast as possible. And so there are some current solutions today. There is Edit Flow and Publish Press. And so while they're great solutions, I think they still fall in the Frankenstein side of the conversation, meaning you're hobbling something together. And so they also incur licensing fees versus something that might be a little bit more custom developed, where you're actually owning the workflow. And it's something unique to what you and your team needs. And so I think this is just to highlight that, again, things exist in the marketplace and there are plugins available. But really finding something unique to you and your team is really what we're trying to get at. And I think that exists with the power of WordPress and custom development. And with that, I'll turn it over to Jodi. Great. So as I mentioned before, one of the favorite, my most favorite parts of my job is being able to talk with clients. In fact, I pretty much talk all day. But I enjoy that because everybody uses WordPress in a different way. But what I want to really challenge all of you to do is to think about ways to bend WordPress to the way that you use it. So essentially setting up how you would like to use it and then making that happen. These are some of the clients that I have the privilege of working with. Obviously these are names that you recognize, Viacom, Campbell's Soup Company, Microsoft. I get to talk with them every day and hear about some of the challenges that they may have when they are maintaining, editing, and handling content. And content is king. It is fast, it needs to be done quickly, it needs to be accurate. So I'm curious before I go on to this next part, if any of you are using third party tools or Google Docs, for example, to create and edit content for your website, just to show a hands. So quite a few. Why? Just shout out some reasons why it's easier to edit in Google Docs. Everybody has? Yes, collaboration, right? I mean, that's. Redlining? Redlining, mm-hm. Don't want to give everybody, yes, exactly. Back-checking, yes. Costs, also a big one. These are all great answers and everything that I'm going to talk about. And quite frankly, this is very similar to the challenges that these brands are having. When I talk with them, these are some of the things that they say. They're using third party systems like Google Docs, of course, to create content and then recreate it, actually, in WordPress. The copying and pasting of that content is not even easy. They're actually having to recreate it. Editors are forced to use tools like that for redlining, track changes, commenting, freelancers find it easy to use. If you're a freelancer and you're not part of the organization and you may not have access to WordPress, as you mentioned, it's easier to use a third party tool to make your content that way so that an editor can use it. Localization, these are global companies, right? We need this content and this media in multiple languages. That could be a challenge in and of itself. The approval process to get something published is just not one and done. There are multiple layers of making that happen. Better control of advertisements and advertisement placing within content. And then entering media, which is always a challenge because it's not just a featured image for a media story, right? You have multiple sizes. You have multiple kinds of media. So how can we make that easier? So these are the real-life scenarios that came to our attention. We wanted to solve this problem. And I will tell you, as a company at Web Dev Studios, we're a group of about 35 people right now consisting of back-end engineers, front-end engineers, project managers, creative leads. It is a brilliant team. They do all the work. I just get to talk about it. I can't take any credit for what they do. And we have multiple tools in development right now to solve these exact problems. And it all came from an idea. We met with a client. They told us about all these problems they were having. This is about a year and a half ago. Our genius creative lead, Cameron Campbell, came up with a mock-up. It was just a conceptualized idea at the time. How do we take the dashboard within WordPress and streamline it to bend it for people who work in big media, publications, and where content is the number one feature on the website? You remove all the superfluous information that is not needed. You have something in there that shows that it is signed off by multiple levels of people before it actually goes into the published queue. A big one was responsive preview from the post itself. What does this look like in tablet? And what does it look like in mobile? Also setting the category. So you can see this was theoretical at the time. But we were so proud of this idea, we started to develop it and try to make things happen. So let's explore some of the elements that we need to consider when we're creating a custom solution for the editorial process. Now, again, Shada already said this. I'm going to reiterate it. It's going to be different for every organization because everybody has a different kind of editorial workflow that they adhere to. But the idea is, let's make the back end. Let's make the content management experience of WordPress as important as what the website looks like. Because without the content, what's the website really? So think about the dashboard as being the number one project. So these are some things we wanted to think about. Defining the workflow. This is a little bit like the discovery, if you will, of what the dashboard would look like. What are the actual steps and phases that you go through for your operational workflow, your editorial workflow at your publication? This is where wireframing, whiteboard sessions, brainstorming become really important. Map it out every single step. User roles, which we kind of said that this was really a challenge. With WordPress, one of the things that you can do is set user permissions at a very granular level. So you need to take advantage of that for a situation like this because it is all about collaboration, which you said earlier, being able to collaborate in one platform, in one place. Now you're going to have multiple levels of users that have access to a variety of things. So these are some that you want to consider. An admin, a super admin. Obviously, they have the keys to the kingdom. They can set access for people. They can change the workflow. They can do just about anything. Underneath that, you have editors. But any true media website has multiple levels of editors. You have a managing editor. You have a copy editor. You have an editor in chief. And they will all have various tasks that they need to do. They're different. So essentially, that editor level really needs to be broken out into multiple layers. You have a freelancer, which I mentioned that before, but I think that this is important because people that are contributing content to your website, they have some different needs, too. Do you pay by word count? Do you pay by the length of the story? You can set those parameters within that user level for a content creator. So that information then becomes automatically calculated for you. How nice would that be to see a freelancer gets $25 a word and they submitted a story that was 900 words and then you know exactly what they're worth for that particular story? Designers, people that are creating the images, the graphics, the media that is associated with the story, they don't need to see exactly what you wrote. They don't need all that additional information. What they need to see is guidance on what needs to be uploaded to accentuate that article. So whether it be a document, images, but not just one image, right? We need a thumbnail. We need an image for the slideshow. We need a featured image. We need our Facebook preview image. We need our Instagram preview image. We need multiple images. And that is what the designer is gonna have access to and that's what they'll need to do. Then you start to conceptualize this and build your user interface. So now that you have your workflow defined, you have your user roles outlined, we can start to put this into practice. So imagine a dashboard where on one side you have a rolling task list showing you exactly where that story is in that process that you defined in step one. So you see task one, it's assigned to a writer. Task two, it's been fact checked, whatever your workflow is. So you can see exactly where in the process that story falls. You can also have reporting features which are super important. Social media previews within this. Whatever it is that defines how you particularly work is how you want to map out this visual dashboard. It requires mockups just like you would do for a front end. Sheda. My turn, editorial calendar. Okay, so this feature might happen today in a Google calendar. This might happen in an Evernote. This might happen on a traditional calendar in your office on a huge whiteboard. My mic's, oh, is that better? Okay, perfect. Did we get all that though? Yeah, yeah. Okay, awesome. So imagine, like Jodi's been painting this picture, that this could live within the WordPress dashboard. Essentially, we're taking all the great things that you guys highlighted that you love about all these other tools and envisioning a way to incorporate that into WordPress. And so being able to have a calendar that's displayed for all these different levels of user roles to be able to both assign things as well as receive articles. And so being able to track all of that through color coordination, through assignment due dates, through different stages of the actual process of publishing a piece of content. And so an additional piece to this would be also incorporating notifications. I think it's kind of second nature. Does anybody else kind of expect your solutions and tools that you use to kind of like be reactive to what you're used to and other tools that you use? Like it's ridiculous, I think that WordPress doesn't alert my phone when there's something that happens to it, right? But what if you could publish something in your WordPress calendar with an assignment and then you're the writer and you're receiving a notification on your phone like hey, there's a new assignment for you to go right now and then you can drive directly into the dashboard to go create that content. We're just trying to help make WordPress be a little bit more intuitive. And then the next one would be actually assignments. So again, imagine taking that calendar experience. You may be able to log in, you're the writer. You're seeing that there is now an assignment for you. You're able to drive in directly into the CMS and go create that content. Being able to leave notes to include additional resources and references. And basically just being able to have that experience happen fluidly versus I think previously where it sounds like and it actually is happening more fragmented. Maybe you're jumping from different platform to platform or there's a physical component that's actually happening with this. But again, being able to have one schedule that's being created and then assigning those stories within that specific dashboard. Next one, writing the first draft. I just imagine this process of logging into WordPress. You're looking at a calendar. You're able to see what's assigned to you. You're able to jump in directly and actually write the piece of content. And so you're not having to leave and jump to another platform, jump to another tab. You're able to kind of keep track of it. I think it's fair to say some of you probably represent publications where there's just five writers. And I think it's fair to say that some of you represent publications that there's hundreds of writers. And so being able to effectively and efficiently, I think is a good word that we're trying to kind of stress efficiency. Being able to manage that within the WordPress dashboard to provide that efficiency ultimately back to your team. And then another component is somebody mentioned fact checking. I love movies and so I love 80s movies in particular. And I always picture like the newsroom scenes of these movies where someone is like frantically running into their office and like throwing their article down on their editor's table and then the editor gets their huge red pen out and they're starting to kind of like, you know, make their edits accordingly. Obviously that's not probably how it's done today. I think y'all would agree. Maybe it's a combination of that slash and Google Docs where you're then using like these highlight and edit tools but taking that same technology of what Google provides and all these other kind of tools that have been highlighted and incorporating that again back into the WordPress dashboard where as the editor you're able to receive the assignment or receive the article from your writer and then being able to make those edits actually within the WordPress edit. And so being able to again leave comments or color coordinate things or notes or being able to just follow up and track the progress of that piece of content fluidly within one single screen versus having multiple different tools that you're leveraging for that purpose. And then I think I'm passing to Ms. Jody. So this is usually the interlude within the presentation when I speak where I show you a picture of my dog and tell you to follow him on Instagram and I spared you all this time because I didn't do the slides. But it is Sir Frankie underscore and he's adorable. So getting into the next step of this and I just wanna reiterate some of the things that we've covered because I think it's very important. We're proposing to you to expand the development that you do to include the dashboard as part of your process for editing and creating media. Let's get rid of the third party tools and start collaborating within WordPress itself to streamline the experience because that's what it was intended to do. It was intended to be a robust content management system. And so I think that an important note here too is that any of these concepts, ideas or tools that we are creating work both within the classic editor and Gutenberg. And we thought about both editing experiences because I believe that it's really a matter of personal preference at this time as to which one you're adapting. We obviously know which direction WordPress is heading. So this can be done in either of those methods. I just wanted to make that point. The next part to me is probably one of the most important. And I want to share with you a challenge that was presented to us from one of our clients. They had a live event happening in another country. There was press at the event taking photos and taking videos. And those photos and videos needed to appear on the website in real time. The challenge came in because they use a proprietary third party media service. So the press at the event in England was uploading the media content to this third party system. Our challenge was to get the media onto the website in real time. Now on surface it seems like a pretty innocent task. It's not live streaming to be clear. This is actually taking files, video and photo files, syncing them with the website in real time. This was something that got me thinking too, why are we using these backdoor methods to get media to one destination? We could be in a situation like that specifically again be using WordPress for what it's intended. There's always going to be a challenge with media. And I understand that it's not a perfect solution. But the idea is, is that your designers, your experts that handle the media at your organizations or for your clients have a simplistic method to upload images that will make that story work. Not only images, video links, videos themselves, audio clips. And again we talked about the variety of images that you may need. Facebook has a different image size than Twitter, has a different image size than Instagram or LinkedIn. And they all need to be a little bit different. Wouldn't it be cool if your designer had the ability to throw in different possible previews for social media so you could A-B test, headlines, excerpts and images on social media sharing. So on Facebook one day you post a share link and on the next day the title and the excerpt might be different and you can see what gets better engagement. This is that aspect of social previews and reporting in this dashboard that would be really exciting. And then finally, the most important piece, how do you actually edit in WordPress? How do we make this happen? Now this happens at multiple levels throughout your editorial process, right? We talked about all the different editors that you might have at your organization or your client's organization. And sometimes you might edit something and it needs to be said back to the writer to make corrections. What is really cool is, for me redlining track changes that was one of the biggest things for an editor that they needed to be able to go into there just like you would in Google Docs, make a track change, leave a comment by a particular word and or phrase within the article. They also need a longer place to leave comments about the story in general, so a narrative box of some kind where they can write their thoughts and ideas. They need to have it automatically set up when they say this isn't ready or this needs to be fact checked or this needs to be changed. When they make that, click those buttons within the WordPress dashboard. A notification is automatically sent to the writer or to the fact checker to say you need to fix this and then the ability to have it come back to the editor for final approval. They need to be able to add things like metadata. We had a great talk right before this, by the way, a little bit of a side note. I'm super excited about Speakable, which we learned about. Thank you for that information because now we can all kind of like program Google Home on how it would read an excerpt about your website, right? So metadata, we talked about social previews. What about SEO information that needs to be added? Do you need to change the permalink structure in any way? The editor has many responsibilities. They have a lot of functions that they need to do. Most importantly, I believe, is that track changing or the track edits within the story itself. Dynamic notifications to go back to previous users to make rushes and changes before the final approval is given. But once the editor says, hey, it's ready to go, we don't go to publish yet because we're great developers, all of us in this room, or we have clients that know what they're doing. The most important thing you can do then is actually go through your full process like you would for your website and that is QA, your post. So we want it to go to QA to test things like visual testing, browser testing, accessibility, which is crucial and very important. You should be doing accessibility testings on your individual media posts. Performance testing, and then again, social media testing. Have a process of QA dynamically set up within your content so that you feel 100% confident with every piece of media that you post to your website. Once it has passed your QA, it is ready to go live and you have your new content. Throughout this process, we've never left WordPress. We've had multiple users be able to collaborate on our media and our content in our WordPress dashboard. We've used WordPress for what it's intended to do and never once talked about the front end because that could take on a plethora of things. I hope that, you know, I said it earlier, but I really want us to think about adding and editing content as much as we think about how we create and design our websites. Information is so crucial. The easier that we make it for information to get out there, the better off I think we're going to be. Who wants that now? I'm just excited about it. Yeah, just kind of an instillation. Obviously, Jody did a really great job selling that and we've definitely had multiple conversations both internally as well as externally with our clients about the possibility of doing something like that. And I think the highlight is that is something custom, right, that is something that is happening through conversations, whether it's with you and your team or with you and your agency on what is unique to you and your process and what would make sense. But hopefully you were inspired that there are possibilities with WordPress and through custom development to achieve some of that parity with some of the external tools that you're leveraging today by bringing that internally to WordPress. And so with that. Yeah, we just really want to thank you for, you know, for two people that talk, literally for a living and talk a lot, we have some extra time. So we could answer questions, which never happens. I'm really proud of us. Go to the next slide. Oh, this is the next slide. Okay, yeah, so thank you. We appreciate you taking the time to listen to us. We're happy to answer some questions now. Yes, I will very soon. I don't today. And we tried. We tried to like get a demo together for today, but as you can imagine that this is, you know, not something that can be done overnight. This is taking time. And we've been actually working on it for, there's multiple levels of the tool that we've been working on for quite some time, but you will see it very soon. Some of this is already in practice with clients, but as a comprehensive universal tool, it's not quite there yet. Yeah, yeah, I do have a list of questions, which I use as a guide, but there's a great book. If anybody does discovery sessions with clients, it's called Game Storming. I don't, if you've never heard of it, I highly recommend you looking it up. It teaches you ways to gamify mind mapping and gathering information from multiple groups of people, from using whiteboard sessions to clustering ideas and concepts to kind of come to some consensus across the board with the people that you're working with. So I think that discovery and getting to the answers of what their workflow should be like is an art in and of itself. And it takes people that are really good at UX because there's still a UX component to this for the back end. It takes decision makers at the client's office to really know what they need, what their goals are. One of my favorite questions to ask any client at any discovery session about anything is to say, you know, within six months or a year, what would tell you that this was successful? What measurement are you looking for? What is going to show you that this was a success? To try to get to the root of that really helps to start, help them mapping out what that should look like. Thanks, everybody. Thank you.