Tridion Doesn't Work That Way...

This post contrasts things you may or may not know about Tridion (SDL Web) connected by an embarrassing moment in my role as a product manager. Let's talk about too much knowledge, not enough, and why I'm not asking you to share this time.

Too Much Knowledge... Can be Embarrassing

We were recently discussing the idea of "tagging" content in SDL Web Experience Manager (XPM) as seen in the rough wireframe below. This specific idea won't end up in the final product without a bit more discussion, validation, and iterations. Or it might get swapped with something with a higher priority.

Rough wireframe exploring the idea of "in-context" tagging. Our UX designer stressed it's very rough. Don't tell him I showed this to you.

Training your SDL Tridion CMS

First read Eileen Webb's post, "Training the CMS" for background (thanks Paceaux, for the great recommended reading).

Done?

Awesome. She describes exactly what I'm hoping, encouraging, or looking for in my SDL Tridion functional designs and setups, but in a technology-agnostic way for any CMS. As a thank you and contribution to the discussion, here's how to accomplish her points but with Tridion per her prompt in the comments (see the great comments as well):

"Everyone, please feel free to share any tools, modules, plugins, or tutorials you’ve come across for your favorite CMS that can help improve the authoring experience!"

Content Type Overviews

Tridion's Content Manager Explore, the "back office" interface, is much like any other business system (folders and forms following desktop software expectations). Its in-context GUI (Experience Manager), however, lets editors preview and update a "Staging" version of a website.

System admins can create sets of content types based on example prototyped content (Components in Tridion). It's all configurable through check-boxes and selections, the real challenge is making sure the business and technical teams work together to set these up.

Documenting SDL Experience Manager and Smart Target Specifications

The idea of "regions" are important to:

• Experience Manager (XPM), SDL Tridion's in-context editing interface, where XPM regions allow content placement
• Smart Target, the connection between SDL Tridion and Fredhopper, where ST regions show certain content based on things like search terms or visitor or session-based triggers (and show fallback content when nothing triggers)
• Content Management System (CMS) Functional Designs for (SDL Tridion), where "regions" identify where content types are allowed and in what quantities

Although technical users or developers will implement these pieces, XPM and ST requirements are business-driven. Here as some example formats I've been using on recent projects. Although I hint at some of the process, this isn't a comprehensive guide as there is more that you'll want to consider in a SmartTarget or Experience Manager setup!

As an overview, consider the following details in your next Functional Design:

Does Experience Manager work with Responsive Web Design?

This question was posed to my team recently: "Do you get a responsive view scaled to your screen in [SDL] Experience Manager?"

My response had three points:

1. This has more to do with the HTML and styles than Experience Manager (XPM).
2. XPM only adds borders on the wrapping container element (tag) for the Component Presentation and fields.
3. As the borders resize and move, the XPM borders should move.

Of course "should" wasn't enough. So let me further qualify the answer to "does XPM work with Responsive Web Design?" with "yes, to the extent that your mark-up keeps the borders and the XPM field comments intact."

Luckily I had an environment to "prove" my point.

My colleagues had already set up this environment, a relative to Electridion Training (not to be confused with the Reference Implementation), based on a Bootstrap responsive template.

SDL Tridion Experience Manager via XBox Kinect for the Ultimate Experience

I've seen SDL Tridion Experience Manager work in a tablet, but I wanted to try a completely different browser experience after having played with Microsoft's Kinect. Though not technically supported I managed to get the following going on a local VM with SDL Tridion 2013 SP1 running on the home network.

Use the following gestures via Kinect on Xbox One's Internet Explorer.

Bring together two "C's" for a Component and a Component Template to create a Component Presentation on the current page.

A bit trickier, but re-arrange content using open-palm hands. This worked best with thumbs on top and the backs of my hands facing forward for some reason.

More on configuring this setup with XBox One's Internet Explorer after the jump...

The Best Parts of SDL Tridon Experience Manager are the Easiest

[x] Use this Page as a Page Type. 

Many of my customers will attempt to implement Experience Manager (XPM) bottom-up rather than top-down.

I'd prefer Tridion-using organizations took the opposite approach, especially considering:

• Authors find new content and page creation harder than updating fields
• Inline editing or the ability to edit text on a page requires template updates for editable fields along with valid and clean markup
• Experience Manager won't fix a challenging content model, even if you show every single field in context, but it will make getting started with the most complex pages easier

Make the challenging Tridion parts easier, then work down into the details. Ideally you'd wait to release the entire experience to your newer authors after you've tested the content model and create some Good Defaults.

Hard parts from tasks that lack context to fairly easy:

• Hard:
• Creation. Creating new content without instructions or context (especially wide-open text boxes)
• Assembly. Assembling a page without knowing any hidden "rules" when making a page (regions, limits, or component presentation placement)
• Medium:
• Locating Items. Finding items without instructions or the context of the site (Where used, naming conventions, structure and taxonomy help)
• Predicting Layout. Knowing what a template change will do to a component on a page (fields displayed? layout and placement?)
• Easy:
• Update Pages. Editing an existing page by moving component presentations up or down is fairly easy
• Update Content. Editing content in its form view is also easy--we do this all the time outside of Tridion

Form fields are everywhere.

More on XPM Regions: Difference between Insert and Drag-and-drop

SDL Tridion's inline editing interface, or Experience Manager (XPM), lets authors update content in a way familiar to any post-Web 2.0 user: in context.

Rather than focusing on organizing content like the Content Manager Explorer, XPM lets you quickly set up pages and content in the context of your site.

Tangent: typical Web users and especially digital natives may take in context editing for granted, but consider the fact that this works even when applied to sites never designed to be editable. It could be a plain HTML site, powered by data feeds, or a typical .NET or Java setup. But I digress, today I want to explain a powerful, but likely overlooked XPM feature: regions.

Regions let us control what valid component presentations (schema and component template) and their quantities are allowed in certain parts of a Tridion-managed page.

Example from SDL Live Content (requires login):

<!-- language: lang-xhtml-->

    <!-- Start Region: {
      title: "My Region",
      allowedComponentTypes: [
        {
          schema: "tcm:2-26-8",
          template: "tcm:2-32-32"
        },
        {
          schema: "tcm:2-27-8",
          template: "tcm:2-32-32"
        }
      ],
      minOccurs: 1,
      maxOccurs: 5
    }
    -->

Authors interact with pages and regions in two was: drag and drop or with the Insert button.

CM-Side Integrations Mocked Up

In the last post I mentioned you can have Tridion provide authors ways to access external (non-Web Content Management or WCM) systems without having the data completely stored in Tridion. Though we've called these "third-party" integrations in training, from a customer perspective these can get confusing among an ecosystem of tools, solutions, and vendors. Let's just stick with WCM integrations for scenarios where you have Tridion plus some-other-system-external-to-Tridion.

I've found a few WCM-side mock ups (or even prototypes and examples) along with  authoring requirements can help teams navigate the challenges between business wants and system needs. In your WCM business requirements consider including stories or requirements such as, "as an author, I want to be able to manage ________ [some possibly external functionality] from the context of ________ [a Tridion item] to be able to ________ [accomplish some important business objective]."

Tip: if you're on an SDL Tridion 2013 implementation, then ECL (check out the video!) should be a strong candidate if you're looking to integrate multimedia (binary) files from another system.

Easy (but with some technical debt)

The simplest integration could be component text fields that have the unique identifiers in some other system. This would be all manual and isn't necessarily the friendliest approach. Here are a few mock-ups of the extension points that others have talked about here (the list), here (get started), here (best practices), here (early example), here (examples and more examples), here (look, script but no GUI), here (dare to extend rich text format areas?), here (ooh, search), here (pop-ups!), and especially here (great starting point for all extensions).

Where to Extend the Interface

In Experience manager, you can do the typical GUI extensions (1 and 3) but also optionally add Staging-specific markup (see programmatic ways to know your template or publishing context).

Add new tabs and buttons to the toolbar or even staging-specific markup for Experience Manager extensions.

The "S's" of CM-Side Integration

Your data doesn't need to be in Tridion to let authors manage or use this data in one of Tridion's interfaces or editors such as the Content Manager Explorer (CME) or Experience Manager (XPM).

As you consider Tridion integrations, be sure to address scalability, synchronization, search (& select), and save.

Scalability and Peformance

You want to be sure you're not having your Web Content Management system (WCMS) manage information that's best handled by the available solutions. For example, product information might be better served by a Product Information Management (PIM) system, whereas Web copy about these products may be a better fit for the WCMS.

You might have legacy applications that are unique to your industry and business which aren't necessarily bad. Although they may have a decade or so of history, legacy systems may also have a good amount of bug fixes (read Joel or the wiki discussion on c2.com).

Bring you expertise and understanding of your preferred solutions to this discussion but to be open to alternatives as well as realistic and practical on how systems will work together. This applies to content strategists, analysts, business stakeholders, developers, and architects regardless if they're part of the customer, partner, or vendor.

On a practical note, Tridion's Content Manager Explorer (CME) can reasonably handle hundreds to a few thousand items per folder or category. GUI performance slows down at about the same point where it gets difficult (for humans) to manage that many items in a given folder.

Inline vs. In-Context Editing

Inline editing simply means the ability to update your content in the context of the page its on. Interfaces like SDL Tridion’s Experience Manager give authors the ability to click and start typing to make changes  which might be impressive (or not). But the strongest feature is being able to find your pages with a navigation you’re familiar with and edit content in the context of its surrounding  content.

If you notice, even blogging tools like Blogger don’t do complete inline editing. If logged in to Google, I can however, click the icon to jump to a form view.

I'm one pencil click away from editing this post.

Blogger has drag-and-drop layout, but it’s in a clean, easy-to-follow interface, independent of your template.

Experience Manager Content Types and Regions

I've seen and had questions about the relationship between SDL Tridion Pages, Regions, and Content Types with Experience Manager (XPM), the inline editing interface.

• User Harald Hoffelinck had the same question on StackOverflow. 
• I asked how to confirm how to control what gets added to a page as well.

The concepts can easily get blurry, considering the definitions:

Seven Quick SDL Tridion Experience Manager Tips

Some quick "good design" considerations for setting up Experience Manager page and content types (that also apply to schemas and templates in general). Offer good defaults with flexibility and build much of the decisions into the system itself.

1. Offer clear, select-able options. Use brief, business friendly-names like "home," or "article." Users don't need to know they're templates, not in the context of selecting them.
2. Be visually clear. Use icons (very cool feature), but 48 pixels and smaller can be kind of small. Use wireframes, maybe some color, or even text to make it clear what each item is (good tips from colleague Hao).
3. Offer good defaults. In content types, add practical descriptions and use good default text. Make it clear what the Lorem Ipsum parts are.
4. Reduce options. Reduce the number of available types where possible, similar to hiding schemas and template options from certain authors.
5. Prevent mistakes. Remove the Default Template options. Authors may assume you want them to use them. Add default settings when required.
6. Encourage ownership. Have the business own these naming conventions, settings, images, and descriptions. Descriptions probably shouldn't match schema names.
7. Try it. Finally, try creating or editing content with your setup. Or better yet, have your colleague or an author try it out, preferably before all-hands training.

Got some nice examples or gotchas when working with Experience Manager to share?