We are excited to announce the completion of the second major development phase of our engagement with Forcepoint: improving the authoring experience for editors and implementing a new design.

Reimagining the Editorial Experience

Four Kitchens originally launched Forcepoint’s spiffy new Drupal site in January 2016. Since then, Forcepoint’s marketing strategy has evolved, and they hired a marketing agency to perform some brand consulting, while Four Kitchens implemented their new approach in rebuilding the site. We also took the opportunity to revisit the editorial experience in Drupal’s administrative backend.

Four Kitchens has been using Paragraphs on some recent Drupal 8 projects and found it to be a compelling solution for clients that like to exert substantive editorial control at the individual page level—clients like Forcepoint. Providing content templates for markup that works hand in hand with the component-driven theming approach we favor is a primary benefit we get from using Paragraphs for body content.

Editorially, the introduction of Paragraphs gives Forcepoint a more flexible means of controlling content layout for individual pages without having to rely as heavily on Panels as we did for the initial launch. We’re still using Panels for boilerplate and some content type specific data rendering, but the reduced complexity required for editors to layout body content will allow their content to evolve and scale more easily.

In addition to using paragraphs for WYSIWYG content entry, Forcepoint editors are now also able to insert and rearrange related content, Views, Marketo forms, videos, and components that require more complex markup to render.

We’re big proponents of carefully crafted content models and structured data. Overusing Paragraphs runs the risk of removing some or even a lot of that structure. Used judiciously however, it allows us to give clients like Forcepoint the flexibility they want while still enforcing desirable constraints inherent in the design.

Congratulations!

We’ve been working with Forcepoint for over a year now, and are incredibly proud of the solutions we’ve created with them. This kind of close relationship and collaboration is what we strive for with all of our partners. We thrive on understanding our partners’ underlying business challenges and goals, collaborating with their teams, and creating solutions that delight their customers.

The Forcepoint team was led by Chris Devidal as the project manager, working alongside Taylor Smith who acted as internal product owner. Jeff Tomlinson was technical lead and assisted Patrick Coffey who adeptly wrangled all the difficult backend issues. Significant frontend technical leadership was provided by Evan Willhite who worked with Brad Johnson to implement a challenging design. Props also go to Keith Halpin, Neela Joshi and Adam Bennett at Forcepoint for their many contributions.

The post Continued Improvement appeared first on Four Kitchens.