Editorial design

I’ve been playing with editorial design implementation today on the back of an enquiry from a prospect and I thought I’d share my thoughts and potential implementation if the prospect turns to a client.

I enjoyed listening to Greg Wood talk about editorial design at EECI in Leiden and his presentation certainly assisted my thought process today - cap doffed sir - unfortunately though, his implementation was fairly simple in comparison to the enquiry I got in my inbox today.

Essentially, the layout and content for this weblog will differ per entry. Only a few elements will be consistent - title, “hero” image and intro text.

Here’s an example of one such layout http://forr.st/~BIZ

Of course that 2 column layout could just be 1 column

Thinking about how I’d implement something like that though was a challenge and at the moment this is the setup I have (any improvements are welcome - this was a big step away from my usual setup).

I have a custom field group that contains

  • entry title (of course)
  • hero image
  • intro (text area)
  • content (Matrix with 1 column as a WYGWAM field with custom CSS)
  • hero images (Matrix with image, caption with options for colour, bg, width & position)

Now here is where things, I don’t think, are too elegant. I’ve posted an example on http://ee.digitalevangelist.net/pages/story/

So the first image is my hero image, ‘a brother’s story’ is my entry title and the first paragraph is my intro.

Moving into the content, I’ve uploaded an image via WYGWAM, stuck a div around it and floated it left while the text content goes to in a div floated to the right.

I’ve then added another hero image with a caption but I’ve added another row to my content Matrix, typed {image_1} and used LG Replace plugin to pull the images and captions from the hero images Matrix.

I decided to use Matrix on the content because when you’re asking a client to add custom styling etc, a new row makes more sense to them because it actually separates the elements within the publishing screen.

As I said, I still think this is quite cumbersome and hope to improve on it but thought it may be of use to some.