Usability for content editors: Drupal or PHP framework?

Question

Greetings:

I am going to develop a basic Web site that supports some custom content types, is multilingual, and has content moderation workflow for a restricted group of content editors. This seems like an obvious choice for Drupal, except... the content editors will have little computer experience.

In my opinion, that is a show-stopper for Drupal. For example, placing arbitrary inline images in content is a task that WordPress does well. I find Drupal's alternatives (IMCE, img_assist, etc.) clunky and not well integrated, and that will be a problem for this group of content editors.

Also, none of the Drupal content workflow modules I tried seemed well-integrated; they all had a "tacked on" feel to them. As an admin I can understand why an "Accessible content" menu item (via Module Grants module) is necessary to view draft content (fixed in D7 but I can't wait for all the modules to be ported), but I'm pretty sure it'll confuse the content editors.

An alternative is to use a PHP framework. I've read a few threads suggesting that it will take roughly the same amount of time using a good framework as it will to bend Drupal to my willing... maybe wishful thinking? I'm looking at Symfony, which gives me a basic auto-generated back-end, but which I believe I can customize to my heart's content.

How do you make Drupal accessible to non-savvy content editors? If you recommend a PHP framework, which one?

TIA!

Answer 1

CKEditor + CKFinder. CSS handling is up to you.

It just seems wild to me that you would reinvent Drupal or Wordpress because a few people aren't too great at using a text editor to place images. Maybe you should improve the training aspects of it?

Revisioning, for example:

http://drupal.org/project/revisioning

http://drupal.org/project/content_moderation

'I've read a few threads suggesting that it will take roughly the same amount of time using a good framework as it will to bend Drupal to my willing... maybe wishful thinking? I'm looking at Symfony, which gives me a basic auto-generated back-end, but which I believe I can customize to my heart's content.'

Totally untrue.

The grass is generally never greener, you will have problems with any system because none are perfect.

Answer 2

Might I suggest the Insert Module in combination with one of the WYSIWYG modules and (multiple) filefield(s).

The workflow modules might seems to be tacked on, however, this allows you to fully customize the user experience, and anything not having a proper user experience, can probaly be fixed using views and possibly some rules and actions and some custom menu items.

The power of Drupal is the community, and usually, there is already a combination of well supported modules that are the solution to your problems, the only difficulty is finding the right combination of the right modules

Also, if you can wait for Drupal 7, the #D7CX ensures a whole load of modules will have a full Drupal 7 release on the day that Drupal 7 is released.

Answer 3

Hi Jim,

I am a developer for a few and maintainer for a couple of Drupal sites that have a group of about 30 people with diverse affinity to technology inputting content. Drupal works great for us and I don't believe we could have done it ourselves as easily. There is just SO much already done by the Drupal community that is hard to ignore!

Anyway, we played around with a few editors and settled with the WYSIWYG module running TinyMCE with IMCE and IMCE WYSIWYG bridge. Nothing against FCK - as a matter of fact, I tried to get this implemented, but believe it or not, its name had some people frowning at it, so TinyMCE it was... Now that module is called CK, so we may revisit this in the future.

As for moderation, we used the workflow module for it as this is fairly easy to get it setup and configured. On one internet site we had "contributor", "editor" and "publisher" roles for "draft", "review" and "published" states, each with progressively more rights on the site. On the intranet site we did for the same folks, we went with "draft", "private" and "published" states.

I would not recommend a PHP framework to replace Drupal as a CMS. I've been doing PHP programming for 11 years now and although I could build a custom-made alternative solution, I don't think I could do it faster. I'd rather use Drupal as a starting ground and then develop Drupal modules to integrate our other systems into Drupal - like Track-IT and Moodle. Of course, this is just me, each one has a different background and experience, so your opinion may differ. That being said, Symfony and codeignite are pretty good for general app development (even though Drupal is good for that too!)

No matter what you do, people are generally reluctant to change. Make sure you got a solid training program in place for those folks. Not only for Drupal, but for producing web content in general. My boss bought all the the Content Managers a copy of the Don't Make Me Think book. I think that combined with the training helped establish some ground rules for content production. Also, have a staging/beta site that these folks can use as a sandbox to try things out and ask each other for input.

I hope this helps you.

Answer 4

Thanks for all your comments. In the end I've decided to go with WordPress, since it is indeed foolish to reinvent everything with a PHP framework, and WP has (IMHO) the simplest and most intuitive GUI for content editors.