Wordpress complex layouts made easy

Introduction: Challenges content creators are facing

Content management systems like Wordpress have been built with the goal of providing a streamlined experience to their users. The idea here was to facilitate content creation and to hide the hassle of coding behind a pleasant user interface. However, over the years, content all over the web grew richer and more complex and with that, the need for authors to integrate these complexities into their workflow, and not always with ease.

Today, I would like us to explore the challenge content creators face when trying to incorporate complex web elements into their workflow (carousels, sliders, multiple layouts of text, ...) and discuss the best possible options.

Content creators must be able to manage complex web elements without any coding knowledge!  

First solutions with mitigated results

Enriching WordPress for Content Creators/Users on a regular basis, and with simplicity is key. Here is what is offered at best:

• Wordpress regular upgrade of its software's core makes it smarter, more ergonomic and more adapted to a fast and richer workflow (easy hyperlinks insertion, simple media embedding, interpretation of shortcodes, better text formatting, ...)
• Plugins have started to generate shortcodes, which when placed inside the Wordpress editor, reproduce more advanced web elements on the live page (photo galleries, maps and more)
• Custom administration panels with extra tools and widgets have emerged, offering more power to content editors in terms of layout management (these panels are coming either from a plugin or a custom theme extension)

All these steps further empowered users, but still lacked the ability to provide the sensation of freedom and ease that come with moving elements on the page (for example, with drag and drop like chess pieces on the board). Moreover, some solutions further complicated things by making admin panel cluttered and littered with large amounts of information.

Early solutions improved content creator effectiveness, but still fell short of providing the long desired sense ease and freedom

Meet the newest plug-in, “Tailor”, the latest solution, a great step forward

Tailor is the latest attempt to bridge the gap between the web’s coolest structures and content creators. It has been built especially for content creation, but also aims higher by taking almost complete control over the page!

Tailor exploits Wordpress customizer API and when turned on, presents the page like on a clean and organized canvas, with a user-friendly menu allowing to simply drag element on the page (quite close to the best possible scenario!!)

… image example here ..

Here are several reasons why you should try this plugin: 

• Excellent documentation: Very detailed and organized by points of interest, this allows for quick findings. Each reference is illustrated with animated "gifs" that greatly increase the easy grasping of ideas.
• Extended icons library: It allows users to use predefined icons or to add a custom icon kit through a pretty intuitive process.
• Great user experience: It cleverly leverages Wordpress' powerful developer API to a point where its options appear to be built into WordPress.
• Fast learning curve: Absolutely no coding experience needed1
• Advanced customization: Custom CSS and JavaScript can be added for each post "tailored". The need might arise from time to time for an additional functionality, only specific to a unique page or element; this would be a great place to use it.
• Nice templating system: Elements arrangements on the page can be saved into a template and reused later (templates can also be downloaded from the web).
• Extendability: New HTML structures can be registered (this is usually done by a developer) and later used by content creators. This concept is similar to directives in AngularJS.

Tailor make the creation of complex layouts intuitive!

Conclusion

Today we have looked at the issue faced by content creators when they try to incorporate complex web element into their work. We have explored some solutions, first elaborated by the development community, which provided some relief but still was far from the desired outcome. We finally discussed the great improvement provided by Tailor and seen some of its most positive points.

Tailor is a clean and flexible approach to the issue of creating complex layouts from the WordPress editor tool. I see an infinite range of applications for this plugin and cannot recommend it highly enough to anyone serious about creating rich content!

Have you used Tailor before? Are you using a different tool for your content? I would love to read your thoughts on this.

Happy writing!