 Good afternoon. Oh, you're awake. Yes So welcome to content before code this is a D8 case study, but our real goal here is actually to showcase how a strategist can collaborate with a Technical lead in working with the client on a very contentious issue content Is this better? Okay, I'm gonna try to project because I do know like Beck alluded to that it's late in the afternoon and Coffee is running low So as I mentioned We're really excited to be here. I'm a strategist for Palantir net and I'm working Closely with Beck white here who's a technical lead and really what we hope to do is to show how we can actually Collaborate together since we're from different disciplines on working on a very contentious issue for clients, which is content Because migration and content are very political Challenges that we often face when working on projects. So we're thrilled to have you here At the tail end of this conference and we look forward to sharing our insights with you So today we're going to go over who we are We're going to talk a little bit about this content before code philosophy We're going to touch base on who our client was a go over their outcomes and talk a little bit about our approach For this project and then we're going to talk about the tool that we used to really work with them closely in defining and Analyzing the content for their new site the tool that I'm speaking of is actually gather content We're Palantir net. We're a full-service web agency and we say we work to strengthen humanity But really we just do end-to-end web projects hopefully There's some strengthening of humanity in there We do a lot of Drupal development for institutional nonprofits like universities hospitals and then research And membership organizations like our client Academy health who we're talking about today So like I mentioned, I'm a web strategist for Palantir for those of you who are wondering what this is I work closely with designers developers and project managers on making sure that the website that we're building actually Resonates with the client is addressing Not only their web cycles, but also what their business wants to achieve and making sure that we're all on the same page when we're actually Designing and and building the site. I also specialize in a lot of research and validation techniques So those are the areas that I focus on at Palantir And I'm Beck White. I'm the development operations manager at Palantir I've been working with Drupal for about 10 years first as an engineer then as a lead and now as an architecture DevOps and implementation strategy resource for Basically all of our projects. I have some hand in I Led the Drupal 8 adoption here at Palantir. So Academy health was I think our third or fourth Drupal 8 project So for those of you who are wondering what is this content before code thing? What's this really about? There's actually two main concepts that we wanted to address the first is Actually about the team environment and how content really plays a role in each Discipline is the word we use at Palantir. So design project management strategy development content really can derail Your process and your scope not only at the project level, but also within these disciplines the second concept that we're going to talk about is the nature of the Projects that we actually work on at Palantir and and why Content is so important for us. So the first one you may have come across this in the past with client work where Everything is ready to go on the design the development And you know your host is ready and content there is waiting in the wings saying hey, I need an extension and This is one of the key problems that you know We at Palantir have encountered over and over again and actually some of the methods we use on this project Really allowed us to stay ahead of this challenge so Code really doesn't become a website until there's navigation and content very typically or Very few of the sites that we work on have no editorial content. So we're not developing apps. We're not developing games We're not developing sites that are centered around user-generated content most of our sites are really focused around the institutional voice and information that these organizations have to offer so We don't there's no point in a site without the content essentially So when we talk about the outcomes for this project Some of these included having fully updated content So the client really got their hands dirty and was very much engaged in reviewing and editing the content The second one was being able to integrate real content during the development phase We also had a very fast launch or turn around between the end of development and launch And then lastly we were able to work closely with the client on Validating the decisions we made during the discovery and definition definition stage Using user testing so we did two rounds and that really played a key role not only in validating What we were doing in terms of the menu and information architecture But also really holding the client's hand and engaging them throughout this important process So Academy Health is a membership-based organization that supports and disseminates research about health systems So are these hospitals actually meeting patient needs? Are they efficient? These are some of the challenges that the researchers and the members of Academy Health are tackling They're actually based quite close to Baltimore over in DC So one of the neat aspects of this project was that the client was actually able to restructure all of the old content and prepare new content before development this was because They were not only committed, but we were really Adamant about engaging them in some conversations about content early on in the process So we work with them to develop an initial menu structure and validated this with tree testing Using their primary audience, which was their membership They actually touched every piece of content whether it was copy pasted or edited So I think that this really gave a lot of ownership of Change right how will the content live in this new space? And I think because they were so Engaged at at improving their content. This really made this process quite quite seamless and When we create a new site for a client There's a key opportunity and that is restructuring your content if you bring all your old content to your new site without Restructuring you're really missing the boat on this to refresh and Update your content and make sure it's current and it refers to the right place. You don't have links going to old pages It's critical It also allows them to be innovative and creative and they're thinking about How they can improve? their messaging as well so Maybe you're familiar with agile but we work in two-week sprints called chunk or two week chunks called sprints and At the end of this first sprint Clients were able to see their content and their menu structure in the site So it was using Bartek, which is Drupal's default theme And that's not really relatable for a lot of clients But they saw their content in Bartek and so it made it real right from the beginning they were able to understand that how they were going to see themselves in the site and It was really cool to see their work immediately merge with our work So when we wrapped up development, we were able to do a final migration Everything that they were working on in the separate system and gather content We pulled right into the development site at the end of every sprint The end of development was no different so they had the same review process They had been doing at every sprint. They didn't need to create or fill in an about page They didn't need to add the extra like menu items. They were all there They just needed to do a final review And so we had this like chill two-week pre-launch period rather than that like frantic six-week scramble Where you forget kind of what you started from so? There are some things that they had to do specifically in Drupal But all of the basics there were there the content MVP was already in place So adding on Bex's point about Bartek and how while it may not be an ideal visual environment It does prompt the client to react you have to have real content in order to get an authentic client reaction about How this content is going to live? Actually, this is also something that's really key when Implementing user testing because if you use Lorm if some you're not really able to evaluate the labels the placement the hierarchy of the content that actually is going to be in the new site and users might actually not pick up up pick up upon some of the Pain points that might be more visible with actual content. So sometimes one of the major outcomes of user testing is The menu labels are wrong the page titles aren't aren't descriptive enough and That's something that the client can change because they're in charge of the content So the initial menu structure that we collaborated with our Client Academy health on we validated it with a tool called tree jack Which is one of optimal workshops products which tests users ability to find Different menu items and it really pushes them to consider Whether or not these labels resonate with their goals on the site It's like a online kind of survey based User testing tool what was really neat about this was we did not have to wait for the site to launch to actually Validate the initial menu structure because the way that optimal workshop Works is essentially you're just testing the labels So it's really great because as a strategist I didn't have to derail or impact The process of my team members the designers and developers working on this project and could also get the client to Work on improving the menu structure so it it worked more effectively for their audience Some of the user testing feedback led to design and development changes But most of it like Beck mentioned was around menu labeling some organization and then also content placement But what was neat about gather content? Excuse me that was that what was really neat about the tool we use gather content is actually the client was able to Make these changes on their own and we'll talk about this shortly as well Just their ability to make changes and improvements independent Lee of of our development and design work and process So in terms of our approach We had a variety of techniques that we used To collaborate with the client and really make sure we were on the same page With regards to content. So these included scheduling So making sure that there were clear deadlines as back mentioned defining and identifying structured content Making sure that content was integrated into the design process and then also finally an automated migration with gather content So content is truly a dependency it's really important that we include it in the beginning stage of the project as a key conversation So that we can actually make sure that we know everything there is to know about the content and then also Understand the client's needs around content. So when we say content, we mean the pages the menus the taxonomy It's also like the homepage slogan or the footer wording or text for important call-to-action boxes And those pieces are critical for the design So the mission statement we put on the homepage design The client really reacts to that and engages with that and we'll have specific fixes around that So we have to be engaged around that content as well And then there are other content sources that we will use as my for migrations For Academy health that was we migrated a WordPress blog and then they had some resource databases that were in MS SQL so we did some of that too and those content sources Come together with the new content that they develop and we factor each of those pieces into the scope and schedule so scheduling Academy health had a clear deadline and cut off in terms of The date by which they had to put all of their content into gather content. This was really crucial because this allowed them to set internal deadlines and also Establish clear expectations with their colleagues about when they needed to get the content to them and this also enabled us to put guardrails around the Nature of the structured content so we didn't have a situation during development where they were asking us to add another Field or add another component it really allowed us to address some of those issues earlier on in the process and We have deadlines like we use deadlines for both the content that they were developing So the new content but also for delivering existing data sources So database dumps and CSVs we had to have those before development could start and even before we could fully specify them so that was actually an interesting challenge that we came across where on the Product owner curation side that was really quite seamless their use of gather content was very timely But because the data sources were somewhat complex We did Experience a little bit of a lag and receiving that and that also did impact the project so Yeah, and clients don't automatically know what the source data should look like And getting the source data right is going to make migrations easier So we use the deadlines to give them feedback on their data when we're getting messy data We add comments to the Google Docs. We send them an email. So they have time to revise their data. So we're not using Development time to work around that messy data So when I say getting the right source data will make migrations easier the right source data is structured and Making sure that we're getting structured content from the the content development process is going to make migrations Possible so we can they can develop new content and we can migrate that new content It's not just their existing data sources, but also their new content becomes a data source But in order to get structured content we need to impose some guardrails and keep clients focused on the most important pieces They need to prioritize the content development. They need to prioritize the parts of the content So we want them to focus on the title the lead and the body, you know, I don't really care about you curating related content I just want to make sure you have up-to-date body text So we keep clients focused in that way We want them to prioritize developing content the same way that we prioritize developing features So we dictate the the structure and that's kind of our secret sauce We don't want unstructured data formats. We don't want PDFs. We don't want docs Sometimes even Excel files are a little sketchy because people try to use the cell blocks and coloring To convey meaning. I don't like it. It doesn't help me when I write code. I cannot tell that your text is red So we can't migrate those things they're gonna have to copy paste them So for example, we might get kind of a resume like this It's it has structure. It clearly has a Name a title an email address a bio, but the meaning is conveyed by the formatting So if we get this somebody's going to have to copy paste it and I'm not spending my development time or my team's development time Copying and pasting that's going to be the client's job on lunch So for Academy health that we set up fields and gather content based on conversations that we had with them These are like I said key fields and they exactly match Drupal field configuration It was actually a subset of the fields that we used in Drupal So some Drupal field types don't translate super well to other platforms for example entity references It can be hard to reference content on another platform But that's actually okay It's actually kind of an advantage because it keeps the client focused on the key fields One exception to this would be a defined taxonomy if your client has a taxonomy They have a big body of articles or research papers They're gonna want a taxonomy that covers it evenly and they're going to want to make sure that All of those pieces of content have taxonomy terms applied So go ahead and do that ASAP This is a like profile content on gather content You can see a person's name at the top Bonnie J. Austin You can see her job title her organization Subtitle biography lead these are key fields So we're not showing like her publications or her related content and these fields flow directly into our design so this is a screenshot from our design and It has the exact fields So we talked a little bit about the importance of having real content in the design And also using this to generate authentic feedback from the client What we did was actually to use real content some of which perhaps hadn't been edited or changed but was available on the current site and as I mentioned before clients Don't always relate to lorem if some so this made the site and the content really concrete To Academy health and allow them to provide feedback on things like hierarchy And I think in hierarchy All it takes is the promotion of a key publication Or another piece of content To really make them say yes, this is working This is exactly how I want to prioritize the content and all it takes is to have that really important content where it is Not seen at the bottom of the page for them to say hey We really need you to put this to push to the push this to the top of the page So I think this really helped us create an open dialogue with the client about what content meant for them So this is what we mean when we say content in the design Sometimes we look at the way taxonomy terms appear in lists whether they break across lines If there are large areas of text we'll have jump links And so we have to have the content to make that kind of design decision So we Put this all together. We have the content we schedule it We structure it and we mix it in with the design and then we use our superpower, which is technology Consistently structured source data means that we can automate the migration Automating the migration means that our work is repeatable and therefore more dependable and any content changes flow right in Independently of development work. So what we've done here is we've taken this messy human process It's content development and we've turned it into a data source So we implement initial migrations and sprint zero. It's YAML. Thank you Drupal 8 Migrations are hard to learn and then they're easy and Beautiful because it just is a mapping So we wrote a gather content Migration source plug-in. There's also a gather content integration module. We like a migration source because it's more scriptable So that's our approach and we want to show you a little bit about the tool that we used um We can work with a lot of different data sources and some of them are easier than others. I Need my notes And I would prefer to have the slides So when we Gather content allows us to highly specify our source data So it's a paid service. We like it But you can find the good parts about gather content in other data sources, so I'm going to talk a little bit about that Clients can work independently of us They can apply as much content development workflows. They want there's some scheduling there's assignment their comments And they can involve other people within the organization without us facilitating that And it's structured enough to give us as a development team consistent source data So they can't screw up the spreadsheet that we're using as a source data. It's all controlled It has a great API if you're not a developer an API just allows us to Automatically integrate with that tool and suck down the content from gather content with the press of a button that Makes it a lot easier for us to Pull in the content anytime a developer spins up a site and we can pull that in often because it's scripted so The limitations really like clients don't like adopting new things sometimes Luckily the folks at Academy Health were ready to jump into Drupal so they were ready to they were primed to learn new things and Really I've seen content managers at the organizations we work with be really successful when they're ready to adopt new tools and processes And they recognize how important it is to work on content. So you can talk a lot of people through this It's easy to learn the contents right up front The other thing is Gather content cost money as an agency. We find it really worthwhile to have a subscription But like I said, there there are other tools where you can find kind of these advantages and So the tool has to provide structure and the client has to use it so we work with clients we Set a schedule. We set the structure for the content We set boundaries like we keep them focused on the most important stuff And then we automate the integration so that they can see that content in the development work The whole way through the project and react to their own work as well as ours So now can we show them the tool? Yeah, we can show them gather content now I got overly excited earlier because Beck and I really love this tool So I'm always trying to interject it into our presentation like I want to show it to them now so this is gather content and The menu structure is right up front here. You can rearrange this and well the client could rearrange it And Those menu items correspond directly with what was in the site when we first launched back in October And if you click on one of them No, not a custom one go to the third one down. So if we look at a Topic These are their taxonomy terms We had them develop some taxonomy terms here because they had descriptions for each of their taxonomy terms So we wanted to make sure that when we got the taxonomy terms since the description was an important design element But they had them all present so we put them all in here they could update them over time because they're super verbose and You know once they saw them in the context of the design They wanted to shorten them or edit them and they could do that here and we didn't have to think about it Shall we show them a template? Pretty similar to what you're seeing now. I mean if you're familiar with using Drupal content types This isn't that different It's nice to use a separate site and a separate service because that means that you don't have to maintain a Drupal site While you're doing development you can make radical changes and rearchitect on your Drupal site You can move fields around and change them and really fundamental ways without affecting the content development work But the client is doing so I don't want to manage a site and kind of Protect somebody's canonical content that they're working very hard on at the same time that I'm managing a development team and Working on features and I think also sometimes for clients. They're a little bit unsure about Saying hey, can we make this change? I think what's great about gather content is we said up front? Yeah, it is okay that you make this change feel free to Be creative with your content and it really allowed them that space both literally and you know metaphorically to brainstorm and think creatively about their content without disrupting back in our designers process This is a profile example. Yeah And it's it's the same thing I showed in the slide earlier, but Yeah, I think that space is what was really key for us was that the client felt empowered to actually change and edit and rework their content and I think sometimes I found that when clients are reworking their content in their old site it kind of makes It's since their creativity in some ways because the structure and the information architecture and the way that the content Is it's still in there still in their old? You know their old mindset They're still thinking about their content within the context of the old site we really want to push them to be creative and And you know maybe even take a little bit of risk and considering how their content might differ in this new space So we've hit our time limit We'd love your feedback our slides are up on our session page We are on Twitter we're on Facebook I You can reach us probably through Twitter somebody will get us in touch with you But you can also stay and talk to us after the session if you want yeah, we'll be outside because we know that the room is There's time box, but thank you for joining us today join us for sprints tomorrow as well and Thank you for being here and listening to us. We appreciate it