[Neos] Re: WCM in 2017

[Jacob Floyd]

About inline editing in Neos, I don't think that that is the only editing experience we need. Sure, previewing content on other devices is important, but editing content on other devices will be important too. Plus, some content creators won't want to edit things inline, because the template could be distracting. One class of users prefers a more semantic editing experience.

So, for editing content in Neos, I can imagine a variety of situations that we might want to account for.

The most distant idea: Future interfaces might be designed to have multiple people interacting with the same page on the same device with multiple fingers per person (I'm thinking of a multi-touch wall display that shows a website and is able to track multiple people editing at the same time.) So, I can imagine people editing website content together in a team setting on a wall display. Wouldn't that be cool!?

I can also imagine people working together on the same content from desktops and tablets in a more real-time wiki fashion. (like Aloha-wikidocs, but I would hate to require a proprietary plugin for that feature.)

I can imagine people noticing a typo while reading some content on the train while commuting to/from work, and logging in to fix the typo on their small screen phone. Some websites might even be designed just for small screens and they might expect people to edit that  content from the small screens. (Think about Africa where there are a lot of mobile phones and mobile phones are the primary, or even the only, way to interact with the web).

As far as semantic editing goes, we've already taken one step in that direction by introducing wireframe mode. The focus there is to see content without paying attention to the visual template. The purpose was to allow content creation before the template is integrated, but something like that could serve as a semantic editor as well. One website could prefer editing in Markdown or Restructured Text[1]. Or we could take a more GUI-friendly approach and make a wireframe-like mode that offers WYSIWYM (What You See is What You Mean)[2] like what LyX[3] offers. On that note, Lullabot has an interesting article about the pitfalls of inline editing[4]. One thing I'd like to note, any semantic editing experience should target the content editor and content creator. It is not the same thing as Expose (an admin targeted interface).

1) https://twitter.com/janusboye/status/332895897656635392
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYM
3) http://www.lyx.org/
4) http://www.lullabot.com/blog/articles/inline-editing-and-cost-leaky-abstractions