Control your content visuals

Boris Pocatko

4 minutes

0% complete

Uncover ways to give your content creators some level of control over the visual aspect of content created in Kontent.ai.

Decide what you need to control

The move from a monolithic CMS can be challenging. WYSIWYG editors and various page builders in traditional CMSs give content creators and marketers pretty much total control over the look and feel of the front-end website or app. A certain level of control is always needed, but an option to change the background color for individual words isn't something that's necessary. It's important to have a discussion with your stakeholders about what level of control over the look and feel they need, and why that is the case. Aspects like look and feel should often be delegated to front-end designers or driven by some kind of taxonomy that doesn't really need to be related to the actual layout.

Still, sometimes you need to be more explicit when it comes to layout definitions. There are certain approaches to achieve it the right way. A typical example would be the ability to influence image alignment.

How to give layout control to content creators

The control over layout is often implemented by creating content types for individual use cases, such as “Image with left alignment” and “Image with right alignment”. Components or content items based on these content types are then added directly to the rich text editor or linked by using the linked items element. This approach can, however, cause duplication of content when the same image is used in two content items, once aligned to the left, once to the right.This approach may be viable in some cases, but you can use more generic content types. Create a content type called “Image” and use a multiple choice element to define the alignment. It's much easier to extend the functionality by adding more options to the multiple choice element. You can add more elements if needed. This approach is also far easier to implement by front-end developers than dealing with numerous content types created for each new use case.Another improvement would be to use only components instead of content items for every image used. That prevents the content item repository from being polluted by items used only once.

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