Empowering Site Managers With Atomic Design and Drupal Paragraphs

Presenters: cneigh

Speaker(s): jjones, cneigh, epravlis

The rising use of Atomic Design, a design system that favors using a collection of build-block design components rather than monolithic templates to build a site, empowers designers to establish scalable and useful design systems for websites. Rather, Atomic Design calls for the approach of designing individual page elements called atoms and progressively combining those elements into more complex design units that eventually become templates. 

While this works in an initial site design and development approach, implementing Atomic Design as a methodology for the ongoing management of a Drupal site becomes difficult if using a traditional fields-style approach. This is because the methodology of Atomic Design calls for the ability to systematically use those atoms of design to build up pages. Panels and similar modules offer functionality to that end, but performance and compatibility concerns make that route less desirable. Enter Paragraphs, a mature Drupal module that offers some of the drag-and-drop ease of Panels but is fully compatible with the fields API. Using Paragraphs, site builders can design and build a Drupal site that empowers content managers with the tools they need to make constant, atomic changes to a site and thus nimbly adapt often without the need for entire development cycles. When the team determines new design elements are required, it’s straightforward and less impactful process to introduce new Paragraph sections.

Hear how Chris Neigh, Emily Pravlis and John Jones from Adfero use Paragraphs to plan and build scalable Drupal websites that give content managers the power to make Atomic Design a part of their site management process. John and Chris will walk through the functionality and practical use of Paragraphs when constructing a Drupal site, and Emily will describe how to plan and implement a site management process that makes creative use of Paragraphs.

Audience
Experience Level
Intermediate
Schedule Info
Conference Year
2016
Date / Time
Status
Accepted
Session Track
Community and Being Human