Spark

Drupal 8 will ship with big authoring experience improvements: WYSIWYG editing & in-place editing, thanks to the Spark distribution that Acquia — my employer — is sponsoring.

But how well does it fare with the growing importance of structured content? Do Drupal 8’s WYSIWYG & in-place editing enable it or prevent it?

The new web world order: many form factors

The Big Thing of the last few years: the advent of mobile. Inherent to that: websites that are optimized for mobile devices and act as data providers for apps.

A new form factor — mobile devices — changed web development forever. Before mobile, the life of web developers and authors (content creators) was relatively simple: make sure websites work well on a few typical screen sizes (let’s deny the existence of Internet Explorer 6 and all the misery it caused).

But … we cannot predict what’s next. We cannot predict new content consumption form factors. That’s where content strategy becomes vitally important:

content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design

We had already let you know that we would be using Aloha Editor as the WYSIWYG editor in Spark. In short: it has a very complete feature set, a proven plug-in system, solid cross-browser support, it can do “nested editables”, and so on; but most notably it’s the best WYSIWYG editor out there that can do “true WYSIWYG”.

Sprint

The most notable goals were:

A few weeks ago, we showed the in-line editing prototype we had built for Spark, which has now blossomed into Edit module. Additionally, we also pointed out that we were in the process of selecting the WYSIWYG editor to use in Spark. This selection process was performed in the public Spark issue queue, in order to gather community feedback and to attempt to reach consensus. 73 people followed that issue, about two dozen of whom contributed to the discussion as well.

After working at Nascom for a very brief time, I will soon start working at Acquia! I’ll be working on the Spark project as a Senior Software Engineer in the Office of the CTO (OCTO), reporting directly to Dries!

Why I left Nascom

I chose Nascom because I felt it was the best fit for me. I really preferred working for a Belgian company. Nascom seemed to have it all¹, but in the end, it was not a good match. I still stand by my choice of Nascom being the best possible choice I could have made, when limiting my choices to Belgian companies. They’re great. But the spark was missing for me.