An Editor's Perspective on Creating Content in Drupal

So I'm not a Drupal expert, and I don't play one on TV. What I do do is use Drupal everyday, using Urban Insight's flagship site, Planetizen. I'm a perfect test audience for Drupal usability, because I can give a detailed perspective from a user standpoint.

Right now, we're deep into upgrading Planetizen from Drupal 5 to Drupal 7. In the process, I've gotten to take advantage of the highly talented UI team in a way that I haven't previously. We're rebuilding the site from the ground up, and it has given me a chance to pull from years of experience to develop new ways to efficiently enter and present content.

Here is a grab bag of tips that have out of the rebuild so far:

1. Content is getting more and more visual. I skim hundreds of news stories every day, and an image of any sort, whether it be a picture of the author, a photo of the location/topic in question, or even just an icon representing that topic area, visuals are now essential. Rather than just decoration, I believe they orient your brain as you surf the web to locate content more efficiently and accurately.

2. Simplify your user permissions: It's tempting to look at user roles as a list of things that person (Editor, e.g.) needs to be able to do. But we realized its much more efficient and simple to think of user roles as a number of hats that a person could wear. So rather than laboriously assigning all permissions to the Editor, the Editor also gets the basic functions assigned to the authenticated user, the writer, etc.

3. Put a SUBMIT button at the top of all of your content types: I post 10 stories a day to our news site, and I can't tell you how much scrolling I've had to do over the years because the PREVIEW and SUBMIT buttons were only on the bottom of the form. This is one of those things you wouldn't think of if you weren't coming from my perspective.

4. Content types are becoming less relevant: It's not what type of content you are posting, but how popular and relevant it is. We realized that with all of our content types - original features, aggregated news, blog posts, etc. - it doesn't matter what type of story it is, but how popular and interesting it is. Our slideshow is currently just for original feature content, but in Drupal 7 we're going to assign any content to the slideshow that we think is most exciting to our audience. That's what people are looking for, not whether the person wrote for me or for a blog or the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Overall, I'm very excited about our leap into Drupal 7 and I'm greatly looking forward to finding more innovative ways to use it to present high-quality content to our audience.