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!