Publishing workflows for long-form content

The CMS Questions
1

Hello,

I am turning my attention to setting up Kirby pages for long-form articles, and I’m curious if people have any tips for how to set this up for the best publishing workflow.

Between the writer field, blocks field, and markdown/kirby text, it seems like there are many ways to achieve the same effect. What I’m curious about is how extensible each of these solutions is and what the publishing workflow would look like.

For example, each article could include:

  • headings
  • paragraphs
    • subscripts and superscripts
    • hyperlinks
    • bold, italic, etc.
  • images with captions
  • tables
  • citations

For the citations part, I plan to build a custom solution that allows me to choose pages from a publications library to automatically generate the in-line reference to a list of citations at the end of the article, kind of like this plugin does for footnotes.

In terms of workflow, my colleagues and I generally work in Microsoft Word until we have a complete article. Then I copy and paste from Word into our current Wordpress site, fix formatting issues, and upload the images.

I’m not really happy with this workflow since publishing to the website is not super simple and I generally have to carefully fix formatting details. In particular, hyperlinks, greek letters, and superscripts have been consistently problematic. Also, adding images and captions is a somewhat manual process.

So, I’m wondering if anyone has recommendations for creating a very streamlined workflow in Kirby. I really like the panel experience of the blocks field so that is probably my preference, but the simplicity of markdown/kirby text also seems appealing.

For the citations plugin, I’m guessing I could achieve the functionality I need with either KirbyTags or custom marks/nodes.

So, has anyone created any really nice publishing workflows?

In an ideal world, everything would end up as blocks in a blocks field, images would automatically get their captions and alt text, superscripts, links, tables would maintain their formatting, and citations would be automatically recognized. I’ll need to have some sort of editing process where I can pass the draft around between colleagues (and ideally track changes) and then some easy way to upload everything to Kirby.

2

I’ve done some additional research on this, and it seems like there are a few possible workflows:

Work in Kirby directly

Pros:

  • Can enforce content style
  • No upload/publishing process
  • Single source of truth

Cons:

  • Have to work online
  • No keyboard shortcut for inserting content
  • Can’t simultaneously edit the document with multiple people
  • No revisions tracking (could probably a plugin for some level of tracking, but some colleagues might not be able to use that very well.
  • I will probably need to build some sort of minimal export feature to convert a blocks-based article into .rtf or .txt files for import into Affinity Publisher (a part of my workflow I had forgotten about).

Paste HTML into Kirby

It looks like the Panel can convert pasted HTML into blocks natively. Therefore, some workflow that results in an HTML document could be easily pasted in.

Pros:

  • Copy and paste is nice and user friendly
  • Should work “out of the box” for basic functionality

Cons:

  • I don’t know what apps I would use to create the initial HTML document when working with people who aren’t very technical.
  • Can’t as easily enforce style guidelines

Convert Markdown to blocks

Looks like there is a pretty easy path to script converting Markdown into Kirby blocks. This comment was most helpful: How to convert markdown to Kirby blocks at scale - #7 by isaactopo.

There are lots of desktop and web applications for working with Markdown. So, then I could probably create a script that ingests a markdown file along with some bundled images and imports everything into Kirby as blocks.

Pros:

  • Offline writing and editing workflow is completely customizable (track revisions, wide choices of editing software, etc.)
  • Looks like uploading to Kirby can be mostly automated

Cons:

  • Can’t enforce style guidelines as easily
  • While the import/upload can be mostly automatic, I will likely still have to do some manual work to collect all the assets together into a format that is easily uploaded
  • If I want to do custom things (like citations) I’ll probably have to put that into the markdown documents manually or wait to do that once the content is in Kirby.

I think this exercise made me realize that my team hasn’t really been using our website CMS as it was designed. Maybe I can change that after migrating to Kirby, since it seems like working in Kirby directly and creating an export script will overall be the best option.

I would still be curious if anyone has created their own workflows that they think are unique or clever though!

3

I have learned something else interesting. It turns out .docx files are basically zip archives with XML files and images inside.

Kirby can already handle copy-and-paste from a Word document into the panel. However, comments, and tracked revisions show up if they are present. Also, images are not uploaded (which is expected), but a blank image block unfortunately isn’t added either.

So, one other option would be to write a php script that can parse a .docx file along with the bundled images and upload all of that info into Kirby blocks.

Unfortunately, I think that getting everyone in my organization to work directly in Kirby might not be feasible. So, I might be stuck with some sort of Word-based workflow.

If I decide to make a script that can look inside a .docx file, I think there are a couple of things that would be good to know:

  1. Does Kirby have a built-in way to convert HTML to markdown? For example, Word tables are imported as HTML in a markdown block which I don’t think is very readable. Converting it to a more plain markdown table would be better I think.
  2. How would one build an interface in the panel where the user can upload a .docx file, have the script process it, and then remove the un-needed .docx file after it is no longer needed? I know Kirby has a files field, but I’m not sure that would be applicable for this workflow. Would this be custom field territory?
4

I have done some more digging, and I think I have a sense for a .docx reading plugin I would eventually like to build (now may not be the right time). I know I’m not the first person to think of this, but here are some resourced that I collected which I think will be useful:

In terms of a general outline, my thought is to make a Kirby plugin with a custom field that adds an upload button to the panel. The user would upload their .docx file, and then the script would parse it into Kirby blocks and eventually delete the .docx file.

Opinionated ideas I like:

  • Automatically remove extra line breaks and empty paragraphs.
  • Automatically remove styles from tables (let the website handle this so everything is on-brand)
  • Except for bold, italic, underline, strike through, superscript, subscript, hyperlinks, and lists, remove all styles from Word.
    • Convert tables to Markdown if the extra Markdown options are turned on in Kirby
  • Possibly allow the user to upload their images first, and then have the script point to those original images rather than the potentially compressed/downsampled ones inside the .docx archive.
  • Have plugin config options that allow the parsing to be configured to handle custom marks/nodes that people may have added to their Kirby site.
    • Regex or something similar for finding custom annotations in the raw text?
    • Callbacks for processing any custom annotations?

Compared to what Kirby’s copy-and-paste can currently handle, this would hopefully have the following advantages:

  • Remove unwanted styles and formatting that could be inherited from Word.
  • Avoid accidentally including comments and revisions
  • Automatically include images (with captions and alt-text)
  • Support for custom features