Building on Drupal's Admin Experience: In-Context Content Creation

By mandclu, Wed, 10/28/2020 - 07:35

When I think about the admin experience of Drupal, I often think about context. 

As a longtime Drupal user, it's easy enough for me to know that wherever I am in a Drupal site, there's a predictable spot in the admin menu where I can select a content type and start creating content. For people new to Drupal, or even new to the concept of managing website content, this is nowhere near as obvious. Training will help, but we can also employ the principle of multimodal interaction to provide additional options in ways that will be more obvious.

As mentioned in my previous blog about Drupal's admin experience, there a lot of value in providing in-context link for editors to manage content in the page they're looking at, rather than having to remember somewhere else within the site that they need to go.

Today's release of Add Content By Bundle 1.1.0 extends this capability, by also allowing a site builder to customize the content form by context. For example, you could provide a simplified form for making quick additions to an events calendar, but allow for a more robust set of fields when editing events on their own.

You could also allow for both modes on the same page: a "quick add" that uses a simplified mode, and a "detail add" when an author knows they will need to supply additional detail.

I hope to get an animated GIF to demonstrate this soon. Once I do I'll add it to the project page, but also to this post, to make these examples more obvious.

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