Drupal's flexible theming system has made lots of amazing site designs possible, from the respectably contemporary White House web site to Pete Droge's Drupal-driven Flash masterpiece. What most Drupal sites don't show off, however, is what content editors work with every day: the notoriously unglamorous content creation, editing, and management screens. Tools for those users are often neglected, even though their success is critical for any content-driven site.
At this year's DrupalCon in Chicago (and last year's Web Content Conference), Karen McGrane and I co-presented on content strategy and the importance of the backend experience for successful sites. In both presentations, we focused on techniques for discovering what pain points are most acute for a site's editors, and common patterns for solving those problems. The response we've received at both conferences has been unanimous: "Once we know what kind of tools are needed, how can we build them in Drupal?"
The great news is that there are quite a few flexible tools to streamline your Drupal site's day-to-day content management workflow without writing any custom code. In this article we'll explore a couple of the easy wins, highlight modules that can be used to build out more complex tools, and give you some useful next steps for taming the backend beast.