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Featured post: A Reflection on Karen McGranes DrupalCon Portland Keynote

Katelyn Fogarty's picture

I just finished listening to the DrupalCon Portland’s Wednesday keynote presented by Karen McGrane about UX experience and content for all devices.

[I'll add the keynote video once it is posted, but I didn't want to wait to share my thoughts]

What I took away from her talk was, we need to start thinking about our content in a way that can be used in many places and not just thinking about the one spot we want it in at this very moment we request it. Wow is this really a new way of thinking? I’ve been working with Drupal for the past 5 years starting with Drupal 5 in 2008. At my last job prior to Acquia the team I worked on built all our sites on Drupal 6 exactly how Karen was recommending, but the end users weren’t ready for that approach. We built a content type that would create just a page full of meta data related to each one of our products. Some example fields we used were; image fields to upload the product box image at every angle, 150 character product overview field, 300 character product overview field, feature list field, benefits field and so on. This node was then used to populate views and template files that created our product pages, store pages and paid search landing pages throughout our website. Those fields were then able to be edited in one place and changed everywhere. We didn’t build the site responsive at that time but we would have easily had all the content available to use however we wanted if we did.

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