Story First Drupal

We are all living in a bubble of a developer centric Drupal.

What if Drupal was truly a productivity tool for original content creation?

Let’s switch perspective. Let’s try to get rid of all assumptions from our evolved paradigms for a moment and evolve the idea of a Story First Drupal - the ultimate productivity tool for content creators from idea to a story release.

But why should we care?

The way we build solutions highly depends on the tools we have. As much as they enable us to build things, they also lock us into a frame. The adoptions of Paragraphs is a good example for a transformation in CMS architecture. Suddenly you need less content types, maybe more / different taxonomies and fields. Chances are that if you apply multiple such paradigm shifts at the same time, known assumptions are simply wrong, or you would preferrably have started completely different.

The story lifecycle

We will investigate the lifecycle of a story and look at the typical tools used and identify enablers and killers from the idea that starts as free unstructured content to the release of well structured channel optimized content. We will also look at typical tools that are used within these stages and the requirement for unmanaged and managed processes along the story lifecycle.

Everything as content?

We will investigate typical types of content, from articles to landing pages. We will look at what is typically content, configuration with site building and how the developer dependency is limiting content creators and storytelling.

We will investigate how typical Drupal tools (Views, Blocks, Layout, ...) need to be built differently or adapted to fit such a content centric domain.

A truly out-of-the-box Drupal

Let's develop the idea of a Drupal that requires zero site building, zero theming, zero development and is ready for immediate public release. A solution that simply allows to jumpstart into content creation and publishing.

Primer - a "better Drupal"

Our research and experiments resulted in the creation of Primer, an opinionated and modular base Drupal distribution. It tries to implement many of the ideas above without introducing disadvantages or limiting the freedom of developers or site builders. Yet it provides recommendations and establishes best practices for minimal maintenance cost with a high level of standardization across installations.

Among many other things, it's built on top of Paragraphs + Paragraphs Collections + Behavior Plugins.

We will look into example projects, how they are architected and how the Editor will work with content.

And then we can discuss if these findings should shape the future of Drupal Core and Contrib.