Out of box, Drupal would likely score a C- on ease-of-use for content managers, even with the much-improved UI accompanying Drupal 7. Drupal 8 scores closer to a B+, but is not yet available.

At Webdrips. we understand the pitfalls of the Drupal 6/7 user experience, and strive to deliver an end-product that never requires a content editor to enter HTML markup or any sort of script to get content or media to display correctly and with the desired behaviors. This is an excellent example of why the discovery phase is critical, as proper up-front documentation and review will make for an elegant user experience. This is also why we engineer a working data model before we address the look and feel.

Improved Content Entry Forms

Probably the most glaring issue facing content editors dealing with vanilla Drupal forms is, well, they're very Druaal-esque. As such, we've found it necessary to provide some basic overhauls to the content entry form, "de-Drupalizing" many of the terms seen in the UI with ones that non-Drupal users can understand. We've also seen many of the traps that non-Drupal users fall into, and deliver every site with built-in help. 

It's also important to understand the proper set of modules that will aid content entry. For example, having a properly configured WYSIWYG editor will keep your content editors "honest" to your site's theme and prevent them from accidentally pasting in potentially harmful scripts. 

Complete Workflow

Drupal has some very powerful contributed modules that aid in creating a content creation and publishing workflow that's suited for even the most complex use cases. For example, suppose you want all internal company events requiring a dedicated room to be approved by a facilities person before being published. Drupal can handle that with one CPU tied behind its back.

Now suppose your event is published to the calendar but someone goes in and changes the date, room, or time. Again, this situation is handled with ease by Drupal by un-publishing the event until Facilities has approved the date, room, or time change again.

As an added bonus, Drupal will send out all the email notifications to the proper people/roles during any stage/trigger of the workflow and your event can be set to expire and be pulled from the calendar automatically at a set date/time.

Automated Form Generation

Automated forms is one of the many examples in which the power of Drupal can be harnessed to greatly benefit your content editors and site visitors. For example, when performing a review of a site map, it was discovered that over 60 webforms were being used/maintained for downloading collateral. What's worse is that all these forms needed maintenance code to synchronize the data populated in the form with a CRM platform. Plus the form had extra un-necessary fields for gathering user data that was often faked, like country, stage, zipcode, and so on.  

After the re-design, content managers could choose one of six base forms, populate the introduction text, form title, button title, and a few other places, and Drupal took care of the rest by creating a page with an embedded form and all the embedded and surrounding text. The form was also only half as large since we were able to extract geo information from the end user to populate important fields without the user being able to give false information.

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