5 Things to Demand From Your Drupal Editorial Experience

For many of our Drupal clients, it’s a familiar tale that keeps echoing: Content authors and marketers are too often left out in the cold. They’re grappling with a setup that demands continuous dev help even for tiny tweaks.

Not all Drupal sites are created equal. Because Drupal is powerful, there are many ways to build terrifically bad editorial UX. You might wonder if Drupal can deliver the authoring experience to meet modern marketing needs.

Sound familiar? Don’t throw in the towel on Drupal just yet. Let’s explore what a strong Drupal authoring experience can (and should) bring to the table.

1. Your Drupal editorial experience should: flex to your needs

Your editorial workflow, your way. Limitless flexibility and customization have always been a trademark of Drupal. The platform handles some of the most trafficked sites in the world, with hundreds of content authors and unique publishing workflows.

Content creation, review, and publication should be fully under your control. And you can even edit and approve content on the go from your phone.

If content entry has ever made you go cross-eyed, the revamped text editor CKEditor 5 for Drupal will come as a welcome relief. It’s now easier than ever to find the perfect placement for embedded media quickly, format a table, or pepper in some icons. No time to click around? Set up auto-correct rules, like taking your abbreviated company name into its full form. 

Need an editing experience that supports team collaboration on par with Google Docs? CKEditor 5 lets your users and teams collaborate in real-time with track changes, comments, and revision history.

2. Your Drupal editorial experience should: put marketers behind the wheel. 

If your marketing team can’t create and edit content, whip together landing pages, and build forms, it’s time for a reality check. Your Drupal site should give marketers a smooth authoring experience and better efficiency.

No code, no problem. One of the authoring tools in the latest versions of Drupal includes Layout Builder. It’s a visual design tool to drag and drop your way to creating unique but on brand page designs. (Check out how Seventh Generation uses Layout Builder to create tidy product pages.)

Development velocity influences a marketer's agility, making staying up to speed key. That’s where a Drupal-powered solution like Acquia CMS offers the ideal blend of developer flexibility and marketer power. The Forrester Wave™ CMS insights report ranks Acquia as a leader among the top 10 providers. What’s powering their rise? Speedy digital experience creation using no-code marketing and developer tools.

3. Your Drupal editorial experience should: pave the way for ADA compliance

With every website content update, you need to make sure accessibility standards are being met consistently. No pressure. Be sure that your platform is working with you to achieve accessibility compliance.

Drupal has a host of built-in features and editorial options to enforce accessible content creation. In the latest version, alt text (a description of your image for screen readers) is a requirement. Plus, its “out of the box” appearance meets rigorous standards with testing by the National Federation for the Blind.

Content accessibility measures like adding alt text have the advantage of helping search engines to better crawl and rank your website. Conversely, Google penalizes websites with poor website accessibility compliance. Poorer rankings = less traffic = less leads. And speaking of leads…

4. Your Drupal editorial experience should: fuel your lead gen machine

Promote your content — and your career growth. Expect your Drupal site to empower your marketing campaigns and boost your lead gen success.

With Drupal’s flexible platform, you can easily integrate third-party services. Tap into your customer data and keep the leads flowing with personalized marketing campaigns. Your Drupal site serves as the ideal integration point for all the tools in your martech stack. This allows you to take full advantage of your marketing automation, CRM, reporting, and analytics systems. Plug into HubSpot, Salesforce, Google Analytics and beyond.

The Marketing Technology Landscape is now packed with solutions — 11,038 and counting — to help digital marketers hit their goals. Drupal can help you adapt to what’s next. 

5. Your Drupal editorial experience should: put your digital strategy one step ahead

There aren’t many platforms that have remained relevant for 20 years as Drupal has. The Drupal drop is always moving.  It’s a community that has long lived by the value of bucking the status quo and embracing change. 

As one of the leading open source communities in the world, Drupal is uniquely suited to get a jump on digital marketing trends. AI is one example: an OpenAI ChatGPT integration was built shortly after its public release. See it in action with this video from the opening keynote at DrupalCon.

Drupal, the right way 

A powerhouse editorial experience requires striking the right balance between flexibility and complexity. Here’s where a top Drupal agency like TAG can help. Our goal? Put marketers right where they belong: at the helm of website strategy, brand, and growth.