Structured Content Initiative

Summary

The main goal of this initiative is to build better, native support for custom, semantically structured content element types for TYPO3.

The focus for us is always:
Do not look at the current implementation and limitation, but rather find the best user experience first, then look at technologies!

Goals

We want to create a better experience for editors to work with content types in a more intuitive way.
We want integrators to build such content types easily, semantically correct and flexible /re-usable. These content types are not bound to layouts, templates, or technologies like FlexForms.

Background

There are several reasons why people are constantly asking for structured content or content structures in the TYPO3 core for a long time.

Sometimes a flexible use of multiple columns or maybe even more complex layouts to structure content is required. Some use cases developers/ integrators are often struggling with are flexible accordions, content containers as content elements, restrictions on content element placement and drag & drop. Unfortunately some of the current solutions have often led to problems with upgrade or migration.

On top, TYPO3 should provide a semantically correct way for defining custom content types.

This initiative was inspired by forge epic and blueprint, but will provide its own concepts for the goals.

Scope

During our analysis of what we understand as structured content, our expectations of the initiative and taking a look into other CMS, we recognized that this topic is very complex. To achieve results more quickly and parallelize the process, we identified main focus areas which should be covered in separate working groups. The topic of editing interface UX required changes that would go outside of our scope. Thus, the editing interface UX group became the TYPO3 UX Initiative. We continue focusing on following topics:

Dynamic Grid: Simplificaton for creation of grids (rows and columns) in the page module without content nesting.
Content Block Registration API: Simplification of the creation and registration process for content blocks (content elements).

Milestones and timing

This initiative is a long-term project with huge tasks. As a lot of work on different topics happens in parallel, we created a deliverables roadmap that schedules the single tasks of the deliverables in short, mid and long terms.

Each Monday 19:00 - 21:00 CET we meet in #cig-structuredcontent on Slack for exchange and to actively work on current issues. You are welcome to join us, if you have questions, feedbacks, or want to help us with coding or testing.