This will be a vast question, but I would like to know your opinion.
For now, I use Grav for my personnal use, but in the future, I may have to use it for a professionnal use where I won’t be the end-user.
That being said, what would be the best approach to have the content easaly editable.
Let’s talk about a precise exemple.
I have a block of text, it’s supposed to contain a title, a subtitle and a text.
Would you ask the end-user to learn markdown ?
Or would you create 3 differents text fields or text area and style theme accordingly in the twig file ?
Thank in advance for your opinion on the question.
ps: if you feel the need to correct my english, please help me and I’ll edit my post.
Hi
Personally I try to avoid markdown because it has a very limited feature set and basically seems like more work for less pay off than straight html.
That said it is possible to mix html and markdown on the same page so really the text editor is the more flexible way to go and using text boxes makes data entry more straightforward but at the cost of easy editing and short cuts you get from the editor.
There’s a ton of other considerations though - do you need special output, are you working with existing templates or creating your own, does twig increase/decrease your development speed, etc etc…
From my experience, all my clients with Grav managed to write some basic markdown with no problem.
All of them, understood how to use title, subtitle using # ## , bold italic, and so on.
Adding image through markdown is not easy for most of them though, so for all non-blogging websites, I rather make them choose their image through filepicker. It would also prevent them from uploading some huge images as you can perform action to the image with twig.If they need to blog and include image in their post, I have to teach them how to do that with markdown, how to perform media action, and it may took some time depending on the client.
For managing content, most of the time, I make a custom blueprint for every template, and I remove all the unnecessary element. I add a lot of description for each field, and I restrict their access to the “Pages” tab only. If needed, I also add an access to the theme tab in order for them to modify design elements or stuff that would appear on every page (social media etc.)
I also make some pdf docs, especially for showing them how to add pages, as the idea of “template” is not easy to understand for some of them and that’s it!
All of them appreciate Grav, and they rarely need support from me, and definitely less often than my clients running a wordpress install.
For work done via Trilby Media, we’ve not had any issues with clients and Markdown, in fact any initial concern seems to change after they use it for a short while and realize how much simpler things are when they don’t have to worry about the HTML side of things.
We usually style the standard HTML tags like H1, H2, etc so that they are automatically formmated correctly for the content in that particular position, so the client never has to worry about classes, and things like that.
I’m creating my own templates. I’m learning twig it decreases a bit my development speed, but I feel that it’s more simple by customizing the template blueprints.
That’s probably what I’ll do.
I’ve worked on custom blueprints today, and it’s quite amazing.
I’m always concerned doing that, because if you need an extra balise to style something, then it becomes impossible. But I should do that when the css allows it !