DrupalCon Los Angeles 2015: The Battle for the Body Field
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2015-05-12

With Drupal's powerful content modeling tools at their disposal, most design and development teams have already converted to the gospel of structured content. Unfortunately, even the best-planned content types and presentation models fall apart when users hit the body field. Ugly ad-hoc markup creeps in, house styles evolve without planning, and critical metadata stays locked in blobs of "good enough for now" HTML.

Better HTML-focused WYSIWYG tools aren't enough, adding more and more fields to the mix only complicate editors' lives, and the principles of semantic HTML don't solve the deeper problem. The work of content modeling must extend inside the body field, not just wrap around it, and that requires a more holistic approach to the design and architecture of a Drupal site. In this session, we'll cover:

Best practices for handling semi-structured "body field" content
How content patterns can bring together designers, developers, and stakeholders
Battle-tested techniques for mapping a project's "content vocabulary" 
The latest and greatest Drupal tools for modeling flexible content
Real-world examples of these techniques and their impact on projects
I've spoken at DrupalCon and many other Web and Content Strategy conferences over the past decade, and an archive of my sessions (with quite a few videos) is up at http://lanyrd.com/profile/eaton/. I covered this topic from a technical angle at DrupalCon Austin (https://austin2014.drupal.org/session/battle-body-field-drupal-and-future-wysiwyg.html). Interest was high enough that the session overflowed, and Q&A ran half an hour past conference closing, so it's definitely a hot topic. This session is intended to focus on the UX, IA, and strategy aspects of the 'semi-structured content' problem. Rather than focusing exclusively on the technical tweaks, it will cover the ways teams can identify, model, and manage this type of content more effectively—regardless of the module or editor they're using.