Interesting, and kudos on the Guardian redesign if you were involved - the article pages are my favourite bit of the redesign. I would love to see this sort of bespoke treatment on the home page, which is still a bit incoherent and unfocussed. It'd be great to see a home page takeover for really important stories which gave space to one particularly important story or shot for a day, in the same way that paper newspapers sometimes used to allow the takeover of their first page for important events.
Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS (above just basic pages), what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on one page/section etc? Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time on Guardian stuff?
> Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports
> this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS
The Content API [1] is the heart of the beast - it takes input from our various content systems, including those involved in the production of the paper, and makes it available to frontends in a simple shared format. The CMS responsible for this piece treats content as an ordered list of entities of various types (text, video, quote, etc.). The article leverages a new (to us) pattern called layout hinting. Each entity is given a semantic value, like "narrative" or "auxilliary" which describes its relation to overall story. The rendered templates are then free to play with those however they choose.
> what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on
> one page/section etc?
I couldn't answer that one confidently, but you can always go and have a look at the source [2].
> Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time
> on Guardian stuff?
I'm the product guy for content pages on the site [3].
Comments
Interesting, and kudos on the Guardian redesign if you were involved - the article pages are my favourite bit of the redesign. I would love to see this sort of bespoke treatment on the home page, which is still a bit incoherent and unfocussed. It'd be great to see a home page takeover for really important stories which gave space to one particularly important story or shot for a day, in the same way that paper newspapers sometimes used to allow the takeover of their first page for important events.
Can you go into a bit more detail for us about what the back-end which supports this is like, what sort of entities you use in your CMS (above just basic pages), what sort of techniques you use to separate out styles which are only used on one page/section etc? Are you just working on some stories for the Guardian team, or working full-time on Guardian stuff?
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[1] http://guardian.github.io/content-api-docs/index.html
[2] https://github.com/guardian/frontend
[3] http://gu.com/humans.txt
Really interesting, and thanks for the github links, I'll have a look - I had no idea this stuff was open source.