Creating Layouts & Landing Pages in Drupal: the Paragraphs vs. Layout Builder Edition

today i'm going to be talking about landing pages and layouts in drupal and i kind of call this the paragraphs versus layout builder edition i've given a talk like this before i'm talking about different techniques for building landing pages and now that layout builder is on the scene there's always new things to talk about so for those of you who i haven't met before my name is suzanne durgacheva i'm one of the co-founders of evolving web we're a drupal agency um and we also run a training program so i love teaching drupal it's part of my job one of my favorite parts of my job i've also been on the drupal association as a board member for the last couple years so i'm pretty involved in the community and always like to talk about community stuff i run the promote drupal initiative or help run the promote drupal initiatives so if you are at all interested in marketing for drupal um i'd also love to talk to you about that and if you want to reach out to me i'm uh pixelate on the drupal slack i'm uh suzanne underscore kennedy on twitter and i also have my email address there you can email me suzanne at evolvingweb.ca so you can email me with questions afterwards i'd love to hear from you um so what one of the key things that i think is important to focus on when we're talking about building landing pages and layouts in drupal is the content editor experience and i like to focus on this because i think it's something that we sometimes forget in in drupal a lot of us a lot of us here today are probably developers we're site builders uh maybe we're we're front-end developers or themers and we probably have more familiarity with the drupal um back-end than we realize with the drupal admin ui um and it's important to realize that when you're creating a drupal website uh because drupal's so flexible what we're actually creating is also a tool for content editors and the success of the website the actual you know communication goals or business goals of the website um are only going to be met if the content editors can really do their job and if they can actually create meaningful content um and so i i talk about that because i think it's something that we just just sometimes slips our our mind it's not uh top of mind necessarily when we're building a website or planning a website um and so when i do user experience workshops and things like that i always try and include content editors as one of the audiences that we design for and why is that relevant for this this topic um why is that relevant for today because we're talking about tools for building landing pages and layouts in drupal and those are tools that content editors are going to find really useful so it's important to consider this when when we start planning out any project what do the content editors actually want to be able to do um and sometimes we get some hints of this in the design phase so uh i don't know about you but i work with some very talented designers and i work with lots of different types of designers some of them know drupal really well some of them don't um and often you know actually this design's from a couple years ago so starting a couple years ago you know every design i would get would kind of start looking like this like these really big images um lots and lots of um stripes of content or swaths of content that kind of make up a page and a lot of these things that i started to call landing pages um sometimes we call them like marketing pages pages with um pages with calls to action on them but basically pages that don't really fall into the template of what we call content types in drupal you know not something that you identify as a blog post or an event or a publication but something a little bit more um hard to put a finger on in terms of of content and so when we think about what the content what content editors want content editors also you know look at these designs they also are involved in thinking about what kind of content do we want to put on the website what's our strategy they want to be able to create pages that look like this pages that they're familiar with uh interacting with and they want to be able to create them on the fly without having to go to a development team or work with the designer and we you know just a few more examples like we get these types of designs and uh you know as a developer you can kind of maybe break this apart and you might think oh yeah this part of the page that looks like a view or this part of the page is clearly you know it's a programmatic block or this is actually a node like this is like what the node template would produce but from a content editing perspective they're not necessarily going to make those differentiations content editor might just think yeah i want to build a page i want to create a page that's really visual that looks like these types of of um designs that i see or that looks like the websites i'm used to interacting with um and so it's important for us uh it's important for us uh from a um site builder perspective or a developer perspective to anticipate that and to plan for that and to give tools that are gonna result in in interesting pages that also look consistent so the design you know in the designs it's always very consistent but once we actually get to a real life website you know can can a content editor actually take take the content they want to publish and build something that looks coherent and so i want to distinguish early on in our conversation today what's the difference between page building and layout building because we have this tool now called the layout builder in drupal and um that obviously gives us all this flexibility or maybe you haven't seen it but as you'll soon see it gives us lots of flexibility um so you know what is what is layout building and what is page building and what is the difference um so i i make this difference because i think i think it's important to just our planning and um and to distinguish different tools that are necessary for each and so when i think about layout building i think about creating a layout that is like a template for my content so if i have a recipe website and this is obviously taken from the um or if you're not familiar this is taken from the uh umami uh theme for drupal um so this is this is if i'm designing a page for a recipe and i want every recipe to look the same i want all of my parameters about the recipe to be on the right and i want my image for the recipe to be on the left this is something that i can do and i think of this is layout building i think of this as being like templating for my content page building on the other hand i think of this as being when i want to create a new landing page when i want to create a new um a new page that's different than all my other pages i want to actually design what that individual page is going to look like and i also want to build up the content for it so unlike the recipe example i don't have a pre-defined set of fields like every recipe has a cooking time but in the case of my my page building example my my landing page that i want to build i have to decide what the content is and then i also have to decide how that's going to appear on the page um and so i think this is a bit of a different use case and this is something that we want to put into the hands of marketers content editors or just whoever is updating a website we want to we want to give them this tool and so whatever approach you take to this second example you what you're designing in drupal is actually a page building tool and um you know you can build a website just in static html where every landing page is built from scratch with html and css very lovingly that's still a possibility but typically what we want to do in drupal is we want to design like a platform for for publishing content so we want to design something that others can use to build pages um and so i'm gonna kind of walk through uh two examples here um and i have a little video actually i hope this will play for us um and i want i i want to look at this example and i want to think about it from a the perspective of planning out what kind of late landing page building tool i need to create so i just want you to look at the the content on this page which will hopefully load for us yes okay so we're we're scrolling down the page and when i what i see here i think i'll show it again it's pretty fast it's pretty typical it's one strip of content after the next one kind of block of content after the next um and each element on the page it's kind of self-contained is its own thing i see a big hero at the top i see a listing of content afterwards i see um some calls to action and i see one at a time so each kind of stripe is a self-contained thing and i think of this kind of landing page as being two-dimensional and i know i i'm just defining what two-dimensional means for my own purposes so so if you're you know into math then you're gonna say that's not two-dimensional well i say it's two-dimensional so two-dimensional is like um one dimension is okay we have these these uh the dimension of content where i'm deciding okay the first thing is a hero the second thing is um a view or an aggregate of three items or three entity references and then the next thing is a call to action um with an image on the left and some text and a link on the right so we have the deciding what the content is is one dimension and then deciding kind of like how the content is assembled on the page i have the hero first i have the call to action later on um this is the second dimension so uh you might have a fairly simple structure like that uh or you might have something that's more complicated uh so i'm gonna show you another example that i think i think is a slightly more um advanced type of landing page and this one's a little bit longer there's a couple pages here so so i've got the video so um in this example again we have one thing after the next we have some listings of content um social media feed a set of probably taxonomy terms there and then we have some examples where we have some content that's kind of side by side and it's kind of right at the end there so right at the end there we had a form that was sitting right next to a call to action um and further up above we had kind of a call to action sitting next to a an image and it could be that you want to be able to arbitrarily say this piece of content is going to sit next to this other piece of content in the design and those things though those elements of content they're not really related but or or they're related um in terms of my content strategy but they're not related in terms of drupal or in terms of the content model um i just decided that i wanted this thing to sit next to this thing and that's adding a third dimension of complexity into my landing pages so now i have the content i have kind of where the content is going to go in terms of just ordering on the page but i also have the layout of those elements and how they sit next to each other so i have maybe two elements sitting side by side in a two column layout or three elements sitting side by side in a three column layout and i want the columns to be arranged just so and i want the columns to be above or below other elements and so i think this this landing page is slightly more complex and so there's this other this other um component of um flexibility and it's a little bit subtle because it's possible to define one of these chunks of content um content component we could call it that has its own intrinsic kind of layout like you can have uh you can design let me just go back in my slides and maybe i can bring an example up on the page we could define um we could define for example a um a hero like this first hero a lifetime of care that we see here that actually has some settings in it so we could say oh well by default the learn more link there is on the left but maybe i have a setting where i can put that on the right or maybe i have a setting where i put the whole title text and link on the right because maybe that's how like the image that i want to use it would work better that way so you could have some layout aspects that are built into the settings of a content component without really having to manage a whole layout and so what i'm getting at here is that not every single landing page needs the third dimension you don't always need to have a layout um that's complex like this you could just have a layout where you're rearranging things in order from the top to the bottom of the page um and so which how much complexity you have might determine what tool you need to use and when we're talking about the layout builder versus paragraphs question uh layout builder as the name implies has this layout dimension built into just how it's defined whereas if you're using a tool like paragraphs um it's not it's not adept at managing a layout in the same way and so before i i jump into all the details of that and the pros and the cons um i want to think about this now from the content editor perspective um and i'm going to draw on some research i did with a colleague of mine um as part of a ux study for drupal to see how people use the layout builder and in particular this study compared the layout builder to paragraphs um and we also threw in just for fun a comparison with the wordpress gutenberg project to see how people found these tools and so what we did is we we used the use case of page building um we created a script where we just asked people to create a landing page we got some participants who had some drupal experience but who um who were kind of new to these tools uh we recorded our tests and we looked at the results and i'll just kind of share some of the findings with you um so what we did is uh the comparative aspect of this is that we were looking at how someone would build the same thing with different tools and the first impressions people had of the layout builder so from a content editor perspective were kind of like um what does block mean and where am i supposed to start so when we look at the leo builder it's it's designed primarily and i think i can say this with some certainty i think it's designed primarily for the layout building the layout building use case which is if you're a site builder and you're designing a template for you know how your recipe is laid out it's giving you all the tools to do that and we can see that right here where as soon as you go to sort of add some content into your layout it's giving you these options for adding different fields and it gets quite technical quite quick like revision id um so from a content editor perspective you know it's a lot to take in a lot of options um so you have these tools here add section add block um and so just at first it's hard to know exactly where to start as a content editor when you're adding content um so where do i go to create where's the content basically um adding blocks so yeah there's a lot of options like i mentioned and um once you've added a block you know you can drag and drop the blocks on the page which people love to do um but editing the blocks is also a little tricky because there's no edit link there's a configure link which seems really like a term designed for site builders so um that being said the drag and drop is great and once people figure out where those tools are they they have a good time with it um i'll also mention before moving on to the the paragraphs example that um there are modules to help make the layout builder easier to use so we think of the layout builder now as like oh out of the box drag and drop page building and drupal this is amazing um but i would say if you're using this for a content editor use case there are some essential modules which i'll mention in a few minutes that will just make this experience you know baseline user-friendly for content editors just to reduce the options available um paragraphs by comparison it's not uh you know it has a drag and drop component because you can drag and drop things up and down the page um but it doesn't have the same kind of drag-and-drop feel like if you say you know you might have heard those ads if you listen to podcasts for for um squarespace where it's like easy drag and drop tools easy drag and drop tools nobody's thinking of uh paragraphs nobody's thinking of yo i can drag and drop a form up and down the page so um the the initial kind of idea of like oh i have a layout that i can manipulate yeah you don't get that feeling with paragraphs however from a content editor perspective first especially for a content editor who might have used drupal before the idea of just you know editing a form filling in all the fields clicking save this is a an easier experience actually to to onboard them onto um it's more in line with their paradigm of how drupal website works and it's actually fewer clicks because you're not clicking into ad section ad block add custom block configure the block click click add there's there's fewer steps here you know you're you're choosing what kind of paragraph you want to create and then you're you're filling in the fields um so here the the idea of adding a paragraph each paragraph becomes a component on the page just like in our last example each custom block there would become a component on the page so initial impressions are just okay this looks like drupal it's a big long form and i can figure out which paragraphs to add as long as the types are are named well um to to assemble the page and that's something to emphasize in both these cases you know we didn't we weren't able to just give content editors drupal core uh with layout builder and enabled or just with paragraphs installed and say here you go build a landing page in both instances there's configuration that needs to be done to set up the the tools to build the type of landing page that you want so you know creating something that's called full width image or creating something that's called call to action that is a whole step that's required in either case um so yeah the paragraphs just to to kind of sum up like this works really well um for people who are familiar with drupal um content editing and was faster for them to pick up if even if they hadn't seen paragraphs before where this broke down is that we did also try to ask content editors to use paragraphs but to build something more like a layout so to say oh we'll now now try and add two things next to each other with paragraphs in our case we designed a paragraph that would be like a hierarchical paragraph which would accept a left column and a right column sub paragraph um and for any content editor who hasn't seen that before it's very confusing um and also means that they can't drag and drop that content to other sections of the page so using paragraphs to manage layout definitely not great from the content editor perspective and finally we did also do some testing with gutenberg so we asked editors in some cases to test out this tool as well ask them to build the same the same page and the initial reaction is very good so uh content editors like a design an admin ui that seems designed for them that seems to be there for content editors to create content and just the simplicity of the design is very appealing but what we found is that the simplicity of the design actually hides a lot of the settings and so any content editor actually trying to build the landing page to look the way they want they might not be able to find the setting that they need to adjust what the content component looks like and the other thing that was interesting is that when you use gutenberg and i know probably all of you have heard of it and maybe not all of you have tried it um the when you first try it it looks really appealing because it creates something that looks really nice in the back end but the problem is that that doesn't look at all like what you get when you publish the content so the preview looks really nice but it doesn't look like your website it's not like a real wysiwyg experience which you might be fooled into thinking it is uh and so it's not maybe as helpful as as it could be um the layout builder on the contrary does have some kind of preview that looks a little bit more like your site but does have still the appearance of an admin ui um and and finally like when when you were talking to content editors content editors do appreciate the fact that if they want to build something complex that there will be more complexity to the ui so content editors aren't just looking for the simplest tool they know that they're going to have to learn something if they want to build something powerful um so obviously with drupal you can build your own components um with paragraphs or with layout builder with with block types and so that gives a lot more leeway to the content editors in the long term um so our takeaways from this testing um you kind of have to think of the content editor workflow so whatever tool you end up configuring you kind of have to think from their perspective how they walk through the steps of creating a page um and it's important to keep in mind the fact that you know they're maybe working from a design or working from a sketch or working from an idea of the kind of marketing content that they want to create but they also have to be able to do things like create a draft of the content or change the url of this page or maybe update the meta tags and so depending on what tool you're using and if your form starts to get really complex um some of those details might be lost so um just as you're building whatever you're building test it and think about it from the content editor perspective um and i found that content editors i think they think differently than than uh then then they might or as we might as people who build websites um so you might think first about placing the content um um or maybe you think first about building the layout and then placing the content and then styling the content like making some of the content left aligned or right aligned or making some heading stand out um so there might be thinking about it differently than you so you want to you want to check that editors like a layout oriented editing experience so they like the idea of the layout builder because they can see where the content is going to be positioned on the page but they don't necessarily want limitless options so more options isn't necessarily better if half the options don't look good or aren't really useful for content editing and the layout builder is complex because it's flexible so content editors get that and paragraphs is similar similar to standard content editing so it's going to be easier for people to pick up if they know drupal but if they don't know drupal and they're going to have to learn it anyway the layout builder might just be fine for them to learn it might just require a little bit more you know a couple more screenshots in your documentation and you're and you're good to go so as somebody putting together the website you actually have the power to make content editors much happier by customizing whatever page building tools you give them so whether you decide to go with the paragraphs option or the layout builder option or maybe you've already picked and you're just you're just going with the flow um it's really important to take the time to do a bit of configuration to help them out so um this is going to help them make better landing pages and help make everything more consistent on the website so that it's a good goal to have um not including too many options so not including too many types of blocks or paragraphs is a good idea i've seen sites that have you know 30 paragraph types and 15 of those are just variations on the same thing um so trying to avoid that maybe having just some settings instead that you configure um using entities and views reference fields to avoid duplicating content so if you can give the content editors just a way to reference existing content and you don't have to have them like re-enter the content every time that's going to help a lot limiting the options that you give to editors so here's where modules some contributed modules can come in handy so for for the layout building option for the layout builder option you want to add the layout builder restrictions module for sure i think this module is kind of a must and then the layout builder ux module also provides some added kind of improvements just to the the links the way the links and the buttons appear there's also a layout builder modal module so that the panel on the right hand side um is not so kind of intrusive and as you edit things it's appearing more in a in a modal kind of pop-up box like you would have when you're editing a view and this can be a less disorienting experience um and then this one's kind of more subtle so avoiding site builder oriented terminology some of it's kind of baked into the tools so like with the layout builder the fact that those links say configure that's obviously a code change it's not something you can just edit but just in terms of how you name your paragraphs and blocks just try and pick things that um content editors are going to know and realize and then finally whatever tool you pick like content editors just love the media library it can take some work to configure media to really work well and especially if there's a large quantity of media but taking the time to do that is just going to make the experience better in general and a lot of times these types of pages do have a lot of visual content okay so which one should we use i didn't really answer the question yet paragraphs versus layout builder so my instinct says like the layout builder is this awesome new tool and you know it's been so long we've been waiting so long for this go out and use the shiny new thing um so for sure any site that i'm building from scratch with kind of no no restrictions uh no other considerations i'm gonna use the layout builder um but that being said there are pros and cons and you have to think about your situation i know we're here at govcon a lot of you work in government or you work on government websites and you're not starting from scratch right far from it you have lots of content you've already built up you have an existing website um or you have a development team you're working with you're not a solo a solo site owner and so there's lots of things to take into consideration so first with both you can define block types and paragraph types and this gives you lots of flexibility like you are actually designing a tool and that's amazing but it takes time so set the set the time aside um but you're good for both of those like you can create the paragraph types you want if you're used to using paragraphs and you're switching to layout builder you know you can do a lot of the same thing building custom block types paragraphs has fewer clicks to create content so i know i know it seems like uh you might you might not notice the clicks but if you watch somebody create the same thing in my while they're in paragraphs you'll see that layout builder there's more clicks paragraphs is similar to standard content editing so it's going to be easier to learn really for people who who know drupal um and it's less flexible which i put as a pro because i'm uh at heart like a site builder themer and i like restrictions because if you can just build any old layout uh it's going to be kind of a mess like if anybody has looked at well this is a really old example but groups.drupal.org when they introduced panels and anybody could create whatever landing page they wanted for their group you know it's just it's just all over the place every page is different so layout builder on the other hand like people do love the drag and drop so even though it's maybe a learning curve they're going to be motivated um and one nice thing is that you have them the same approach you can have the same approach to page building and layout building so remember when i talked about the recipe at the beginning of the session the way that you construct what any recipe looks like can be the same for how your landing pages are constructed and that has a subtle added bonus but then you can also say well these five recipes are really special and we can customize the layout of those recipe pages and then you're using the exact same interface and so it adds this extra little component of flexibility and more flexible so that could be a pro for you if you want to give your marketing team a tool that really is got more options um and it has that third dimension right of of what a landing page is the third dimension being the um the layout the fact that you can have sections with content that sits side by side really really amazing that we can do this um so on the the cons now that's let's get realistic so uh paragraphs is not meant to not design to manage layouts and i'm sure some of you on this call today have worked with nested paragraphs where the paragraphs kind of model is used to put content into into separate columns and i remember when i first used paragraphs and i thought oh this is so cool we can have nested paragraphs and and then if you look at actually putting that into place you know it can slow down the forms for editing content and it can be really complicated for content editors to think about and it's not really designed that way so your content model gets gets messy very quickly it can also be hard to visualize the end product so you don't really get anything like a wysiwyg even if you have some nice previews turned on it's still kind of hard to see in your mind's eye like what's the what's the end result going to be until you hit preview and you are relying on a contributed module so remember paragraphs is very popular but it's not in core so layout builder is something dependable that you know is going to be supported as drupal plans for drupal 10 uh start to form uh then you know you want to make sure you're you're using something that's that's solid um editing editing in the ui for layout builder is kind of desktop centric i mean i guess we could do this on our phones i'm kind of uh imagining like layout builder is designed to be accessible so it's possible but really not not optimized and that might be easier with layout builder and then um there's some extra things like you know if you if you actually go to build a landing page in layout builder there's like a different tab for editing the content and editing the layout and um and that's tricky for the workflow especially for if you're not used to that um and you do need these extra modules anyway these contributed modules to improve the ux so i'm i'm in both cases you know contributed modules are involved all right i've got some important details to share with you um so all of that's great you've probably already in your mind kind of settled on a preference everybody's everybody's got an opinion but whatever route you go i really want to emphasize the importance of of quality so so when we start to use tools like like layout builder like paragraphs and we're building landing pages we get really excited about all the flexibility that this provides but we have to come back to the fact that we're using drupal which is a content management system that's really good at managing structured content and that gives us semantic markup meaning like we know what all the fields are on the page we know what the header is going to be that's going to be the h1 of the page you know there's a lot of benefits to that and one of the benefits is that we rely on drupal for creating these pages that are going to be more accessible than other systems can create and better out of the box for seo because we have a really reliable semantic uh set of markup and that means you get all these added benefits like your content is searchable and every piece of content on the page kind of has a purpose so as soon as you use these um page building techniques you know you don't want to throw all of that away so you do have to do some planning around what the markup is going to look like on the page and what options you're providing so one thing i see a lot is just kind of an approach where there's one field for content and then you can put anything on the page with your paragraphs like you can put anything at the top same thing with layout builder like oh we can take any block and put it anywhere on the page um and that that does have some downsides so you want to make sure that you still have a set of metadata for each piece of content that you still have a consistent h1 on the page and that if you're adding these content components using either blocks or paragraphs that you have consistent headings that are used and that they follow a hierarchy and then that you actually test the pages that result to make sure that they're accessible so all things to keep in mind and kind of extra work for you to do um as you're making your website more flexible and then the other big caveat is change management so i love talking about this um you're building a tool for for creating content right and so as soon as you switch from one mode of creating content to another there's a change there just in terms of how people author content on the website and also maybe if you're moving from one to the other on mass if you've already created tons of content there's some kind of migration that you're gonna have to do so uh you know in addition to retraining teams um changing the way that developers are actually working to create new pieces on the site creating new documentation doing migration switching is a big deal so you want to take that decision very seriously and just plan for all those changes that are going to have to to happen so there's lots of other whoops there's lots of other resources on this topic um [Music] videos demos modules you can start to use one that i'll point out i really like the um georgia tech um georgia tech for for those who don't know the long time drupal user um they use drupal across i think maybe a thousand websites or something like this uh so they have some documentation for how they're using layout builder and it's documentation for people who will be building the sites people who will be using the different types of blocks and i really like it because it's a nice guide to just their approach and also kind of shows you what kind of options you might want to give if you're using um the layout builder model so i recommend that but all these links could be helpful for you and i'll post these slides at some point um and just a quick shout out before i'm going to go to the questions in one second um we have some upcoming trainings evolving web is giving a upgrading to drupal 9 training next month and then in november we have a complete drupal training so it's all online but it's kind of divided up into different sessions and we teach site building theming module development um so if you want kind of more of step-by-step training and in drupal um check that out evolving web dot c training and uh now i'm just gonna go and see because i think i saw something in the chat and if you have questions yep there's a few questions yep great okay i will try and are you ready i can uh i can get those for you oh yes awesome okay um so the there are some really good ones too uh some that i actually am curious about as well um how does paragraph and layout builder work with revision oh that's a good question um so well when we think about paragraphs you might have noticed if you've ever downloaded paragraphs that you have to also add this module called entity reference revisions um and so that's like this extra layer just to say your your um say your landing page is going to reference a paragraph but then the paragraph itself is going to have a revision so that makes sure that you're pointing to the right revision so it does track the revisions of the paragraphs just like it would any other kind of content and this can get tricky if you're creating kind of like a content moderation workflow but in my experience this works well and um i haven't had to do much customization around that um if you start to use display paragraphs content in views though that can get uh messy just in terms of how you are able to use those relationships so that's where that model kind of breaks down um in terms of the layout builder if you think about the for for the page building [Music] um use case for the page building use case that we've been talking about what you're actually doing is creating a whole set of custom blocks so all those custom blocks are displayed within the layout and so as you edit them they kind of have their own revisions so beyond that i don't know if there's any kind of caveats maybe someone else on the call would know if there's any issues you would run into in terms of managing revisions for a layout builder okay great uh yeah if someone has any other comments on that chime in for sure we'll move to another question we're using custom blocks with layout builder but continue to use paragraphs as entity references on custom block types because we aren't able to reference blocks in a custom block type is this i understand the whole nesting thing too i really do uh is this a best practice uh or is there a better way okay so let me explain for those of you who are like what is that that's too many things um so imagine um i found this use case recently for a university website so they have all these different kinds of block types that you can use to construct a landing page like call to action or image or video and then they have one that's called like stats or something and so a stat like a statistic can have you might want to add one statistic and then it's got like a you know those um visuals on a landing page where you have like a big number and then you have a little description underneath and so you want those two things to be separate fields but then you want to have a whole set of stats so you kind of need to have this nesting like you'd have a reference to a stat and then each stat would have have two things so the the um the question is about like can you should you use paragraphs to manage those two fields um so that each stat is kind of one paragraph i guess and then there's multiple paragraphs and then the whole stats thing is is a block um and so i think the way around this is to start using like custom fields or to use something like a custom entity type so instead of using uh like instead of using configurable entities like like paragraphs you actually just design your own um and i think that that's a cleaner way to do it if you can if you have the the ability the kind of programming ability to go and create something custom especially if you're talking about creating a lot of them because then you know it's just going to mean that you have something that's easier to manage just in terms of the um like the data relationships in the future depending on how you want to use it like in views or whatever i think it's going to be more consistent that's that's a really good answer um okay uh did you use paragraphs layout module i haven't not used this module but i i think it's this module where you can like the preview actually looks like when you're editing it actually looks more like a layout is that what this module is um i am not sure either and i've worked with uh paragraphs a lot um it looks like yeah i have it like somewhere in the back of my mind i'm like i know what this is i've seen the module page but i don't i don't it says flex flexbox based layout system for paragraphs so like a layout system specifically for four paragraphs that's interesting yeah i think it's really interesting and i think it definitely comes back to this point where like content editors they really want to see what it's going to look like they want that preview i i tried out craft cms um a couple years ago and they have a preview that's just built in like your you have your form on the left and then on the right you kind of see what it looks like as you're building it and i think people really love this um but i i think it's i think it can be kind of hard to pull off and make it really consistent it seems like the amount of work that the layout builder folks had to do to create the layout builder interface like i'm sure if you started using this module um it might work really well in some use cases and not in others so i i have to have to test it out okay um and this one is a good one i've worked with panels quite a bit too um how do these compare compete or enhance with panels yeah um that's interesting um so i mean panels has been around for so long like i think the first drupal camp presentation i did in 2008 was about panels and so like this problem of how do we manage layouts and do page building has been around since then and um and actually now all of these modules are built on this layout um ui module which is has been in core for a while and so there's actually some commonalities just between how layout builder manages its layouts and how panels does and if you and your theme for example wanted to add a new kind of layout um you would do that and it would work with both um that being said i because layout builder is in core and there's this momentum behind it i have not been using panels since drupal 8 came out so i'm not really sure at this point what its differentiators are and what role it plays in this ecosystem okay all right um well let's see we've got another session starting here real soon um any other questions from anyone this was a very good talk i haven't um done anything with layout builder in probably three years so this has come a long ways this is great to see yeah for sure so that's your homework go go check it out all right great thanks for everyone it was really fun and see you around yeah thank you so much

Channel: Drupal 4 Gov

Views: 8,341

Rating: 4.5599999 out of 5

Keywords: Drupal, drupal4gov, GovDrupal, Drupal GovCon, Baltimore DrupalCamp

Id: IFo5KvC6nd8

Length: 51min 47sec (3107 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020