Where do you really manage your content?

I’m going to give you all a little peek behind the Pantheon curtain – at least as it applies to the pantheon.io website. I am currently writing this blog post in a Google document. 

When I am done writing, I’m going to ping a few folks internally to do a once-over to review for style, grammar, technical accuracy, etc. They will add comments, make suggestions, and I will respond to them or apply them to the draft. Once that’s done and I get the go-ahead, this post will be copied and pasted out of Google Docs and into our Drupal 10 site. All the images will need to be re-added and uploaded to the media library. Extra paragraph breaks need to be removed because when I hit Return on my keyboard, it just does a single line break in my Google Doc, but that translates into a new paragraph in CKEditor. 

All good, right? But when I make a revision in my Google Doc, and someone else does the same inside Drupal, that’s where problems start…

There’s a fair chance that your workflow isn’t that much different.

When I worked in the WordPress agency space, we were very early adopters of Gutenberg. We pushed site builds to make the most of Gutenberg because it gave us the ability to craft bespoke, personalized solutions to specific problems that content teams had. We could make amazing, interactive Gutenberg blocks that would render perfectly across browsers and devices and did not break their existing branding and style guides. However, there were always some teams that needed a bit more convincing.

For one thing, having an experienced team able to build complex and interesting Gutenberg blocks is a luxury. Not everyone can afford building bleeding edge technologies on top of Gutenberg. And not everyone wants that. Sometimes, I just need a plain old web page with some text and a couple of images. And sometimes, I need to share that content with people internally before putting it on my site.

We have these things called “content management systems,” but are you actually using WordPress or Drupal to manage your content? Because it seems like I’m using a different system to manage content for the blog: Google Docs.

More than once, my team and I had to cajole our clients to use the cool Gutenberg things that we built instead of Google Docs. I get it. Beyond being a standard tool that almost everyone is familiar with, Google Docs has features that WordPress just lacks: collaborative editing, suggestions, granular permissions, commenting. These are things that plugins have tried to add to the WordPress admin (with varying levels of success). We’ve been told that real-time collaboration was coming to core just as soon as we were done with this other thing (real-time collaboration in WordPress core has been on the roadmap since 2023). New features (arguably easier problems to solve) always seem to jump the line.

Permissions – particularly around access to specific types of content – are actually quite complex to develop without being brittle (I’ve gone down that rabbit hole before). According to research done by WPCampus and Human Made, 44% of respondents in higher education felt that “Publishing approval management” was missing from the WordPress plugin ecosystem, and 53% of respondents said that “Governance management” was missing. These are areas that WordPress does not handle well. For better or for worse, Google Docs has a pretty easy way of handling permissions and editing workflows for documents or collections of documents.

This is the part of the infomercial where the narrator says: "There must be a better way!"

Image

This is the problem space that Content Publisher was designed to step in and solve. 

One of my favorite parts of Content Publisher is that you don’t have to train your team to use something new like the block editor. This has always been – and still is – a major pain point. Your content can still live inside Google Drive, with the associated permissions that you are already using. Any content you already have in your Drive can be added to Content Publisher and is fair game as a source to add to your WordPress site.

Image

This content lives adjacent to your existing WordPress content. You don’t have to choose one or the other. Still want to use your page builder or Gutenberg to manage some pages but use Google Docs for others? Great, you can do that.

I like to think of Pantheon as the “magic middle layer” in my mental model of how Content Publisher works. Google Docs to WordPress, Drupal or Next.js is just the beginning. The core idea is that you have some kind of content source that feeds into the “magic Pantheon middle layer” and comes out the other end on the destination for your content.  In the future, we’re looking to add more sources and more destinations. Microsoft Office to WordPress? Sure. Notion to Drupal? Why not? WordPress to WordPress? That’ll knock Vince McMahon out of his chair. 

Could this be a solution for headless or decoupled sites? Why yes, yes it can. We’re working on a revamped version of our Docs Site that uses a combination of the existing Content Publisher docs (currently running on Content Publisher) with our existing Documentation repository that uses markdown files as the source all pumped into the magic Pantheon stack in the middle and fed into Next.js on the front-end. Now we’re cooking with gas.

Brandfolder Image

If you want to jump into using Content Publisher today, you can with a free trial! We want to get your feedback to help shape the future of Content Publisher. I know it solves problems that content teams have today, because I’ve talked to those content teams about those problems. If your workflow involves copying and pasting, there is a better way.