The Art of Rhetoric:
Flexible Content with Drupal
Rob Carr
@robertgcarr
30 minutes of me
• Current problems
• What is content
• Responsive design
• Information Architecture
• Flexible content
• Discussion
Too much stuff
•Dropbox:1bn files/
day uploaded
•1m websites
launched/day
•Duplicate
information
• 2M+ ways to unblock a
sink?
http://mashable.com/2012/06/22/data-created-every-minute/
Death to the Web Page
•Pages != web content:
• Boundaries
• Fixed structure
• Dead ends
•Inflexible blobs
•Information silos
•Difficult to recycle
Image:Wikimedia
Many shapes and forms
Browser window != printed page
Mobile != mobile
FT.com figures via themediabriefing.com
Good Content
•Appropriate
•Useful
•User-centered
•Clear & concise
•Supported
Erin Kissane The Elements of Content Strategy A Book Apart
Aristotle? Who?
•Rhetoric
•Logic
•Grammar
Rhetoric
LOGOS
ideas/facts
ETHOS
credibility/manner
PATHOS
Emotion
Five Canons of
Rhetoric
•invention deciding what to say
•arrangement timing or structure
•style graphic/information design
•memory contextual messages
•delivery interaction design
Don’t Lose the
Message
Rhetoric. Rhetoric. Rhetoric
Need structure and rules to
free ourselves from the page
Content for Robots
• Group similar content
• Look for common chunk
types:
• Files/media
• Addresses
• Lists
• Product data
• Pull quotes,asides etc...
• Sketch out content types
• Identify relationships
Book
Author
PublisherFormat
Genre
Chunks of Content
•Think structure and markup:
• ♡ Friendly fields
• ☠ Death to WYSIWYG
•Use of taxonomy
•Context: data reuse and transport
Adaptable Content
•COPE:Create
Once Publish
Anywhere
• eg BBC,NPR,Amazon
•Content stores
•Cultural change?
•Use ofAPIs
Evolution... ?
Desktop browser iPad browser
iPhone
browser
iPad app WP8 app
Book cover dominates;‘Buy Now’ prominent
Responsive design
• Fluid grids & typography
• Flexible images
• Change of flow
• Client-side CSS3 media queries
Image: http://trentwalton.com/2012/06/19/fluid-type/
Adaptive design
• Different layouts/content for specific
breakpoints
• Progressive enhancement
• Call separate markup or scripts
• Can be less effort than a responsive
rebuild
• Ultimately doomed
Isn’t This a Drupal
Camp?
• Entities, Fields and Relationships
• Adaptive Themes
• Omega,AT etc
• ‘Adaptive’ modules:
• CTools - page templates
• Browscap - browser inspector
• Browscap CTools - Rules/conditions
• Spark distribution
• Layout/Grid builders
• In Place Editing (IPE)
• Mobile theme + device previews
• CTools, Panels,Views, Panelizer, Breakpoints included
As with all things Drupal, could
also use blocks withViews and
Context... or Adaptivecontent
module... or Display Suite... or
Theme cunningness... (etc)
Taxonomy
Book Format Genre
Need to Enable, then Edit
node_view template
Create 2nd BookVariant
Variant 2: Book node
type, and Is Mobile
Desktop
Header
Sidebar 1 Sidebar 2Main
Footer
Mobile: Responsive
iPad - Landscape iPhone
Sidebar Body
Footer A
Sidebar
Body
Same
DOM
Lego-time
• Pane content very flexible
• Render different fields
• But:don’t punish mobile
• Views could also give us
related content:
• Similar books within genre
• Books by same author
• Customers also purchased...
• Keep pane content
appropriate to context...
Adaptive Layout
•Device detection allows us to
adapt layouts & content.
•Change visual hierarchy with
adaptive selection.
•Responsive design changes float
of containers for accessibility.
So?
•Discussed wider problems
•What is content?
•Data modelling
•Responsive vs.Adaptive
•Drupal Spark: Flexible layouts

Rhetoric and Flexible Content with Drupal