Expressive Authoring with Layout Paragraphs

The Authoring Experience Problem

Authoring experience is a huge concern for web teams everywhere. As it should be. The ability for digital publishers to keep up with the rapidly accelerating demands of their users, and the pace of their competitors, largely depends on providing easy-to-use, expressive tools for their teams to create compelling content.

In practice, this means that publishers need the ability to quickly produce rich digital content from a range of possible components: text, images, videos, social media assets, and so on. Authors should be able to mix various elements quickly and effortlessly, with simple controls for managing content flow and layout. Under the hood, content should be structured and predictable. We’ve written about this before: organizations cannot sacrifice structure for flexibility. They need both.

And yet authoring experience has been a major shortcoming of Drupal, often articulated by marketing and editorial leaders as, “Drupal is too complicated for my organization.”

Other platforms from across the entire spectrum of digital publishing systems – from Adobe Experience Manager to Wordpress, Squarespace to WiX – provide rich, intuitive tools for easily creating all kinds of digital content. What Drupal offers in terms of flexibility – powerful APIs, easily customizable structured content, and a huge range of content management features – has come at the expense of the authoring experience.

Layout Paragraphs

A while ago I wrote about Entity Reference with Layout (or ERL), a Drupal 8 module that combines Paragraphs with the Layout API for a more flexible, expressive authoring experience in Drupal. ERL had one concerning drawback: you had to use a special field type for referencing paragraphs. That means ERL wouldn’t “just work” with existing paragraph fields.

Layout Paragraphs, the successor to ERL, fixes that problem. The Layout Paragraphs module combines Drupal Paragraphs with the Layout API and works seamlessly with existing paragraph reference fields.

The Layout Paragraphs module makes it dead simple for authors to build rich pages from a library of available components. It offers drag-and-drop controls for managing content flow and layout, and works seamlessly with existing paragraph reference fields.

Layout Paragraphs features include:

• Easily configure which content components, or paragraph types, are available to your authors wherever Layout Paragraphs is used.
• A highly visual, drag-and-drop interface makes it simple to manage content flow and layout.
• Site admins can easily configure Layout Paragraphs to support nested layouts up to 10 levels deep.
• A “disabled bin” makes it easy to temporarily remove content elements without deleting them.
• Layout Paragraphs works seamlessly with existing paragraph reference fields.
• Authors can easily switch between different layouts without losing nested content.
• Layout Paragraphs is fully customizable and works with Layout Plugins, Paragraph Behaviors, and other Drupal APIs.

What About Layout Builder?

While there are strong similarities between Layout Paragraphs and Layout Builder, Layout Paragraphs solves a fundamentally different problem than Layout Builder.

Layout Builder, in Drupal core, is a powerful system for managing layouts across an entire website. With Layout Builder, site administrators and content managers can place content from virtually anywhere (including custom blocks) within specific regions of a layout. Layout Builder is extremely powerful, but doesn’t directly solve the problem I mentioned above: “Drupal is too complicated for my organization.”

Layout Paragraphs adds a new interface for effortlessly managing content using Drupal Paragraphs. It is simple, fast, and expressive. Layout Paragraphs is a field widget, and works the same way as other Drupal fields. The Layout Paragraphs module makes it simple for publishers to create and manage rich content from a library of available components: text, images, videos, etc. Layout Paragraphs is completely focused on the authoring experience.

Try It Out

If you want to see Layout Paragraphs in action, simply download the module and give it a try. Setup is fast and easy. From the Layout Paragraphs module page:

1. Make sure the Paragraphs module is installed.
2. Download/Require (composer require drupal/layout_paragraphs) and install Layout Paragraphs.
3. Create a new paragraph type (admin > structure > paragraph types) to use for layout sections. Your new paragraph type can have whatever fields you wish, although no fields are required for the module to work.
4. Enable the “Layout Paragraphs” paragraph behavior for your layout section paragraph type, and select one or more layouts you wish to make available.
5. Make sure your new layout section paragraph type is selected under “Reference Type” on the content type’s reference field edit screen by clicking “edit” for the respective field on the “Manage fields” tab.
6. Choose “Layout Paragraphs” as the field widget type for the desired paragraph reference field under “Manage form display”.
7. Choose “Layout Paragraphs” as the field formatter for the desired paragraph reference field under “Manage display”.
8. That’s it. Start creating (or editing) content to see the module in action.

If you’re using Layout Paragraphs in your projects, we’d love to hear about it. Drop a note in the comments section below, or get involved in the issue queue.