How do you handle interface for content management?
Most clients / editors aren't going to know UIKit, so the default editor doesn't do much good. Page builders are also not a good answer, as they don't play well with Beans (as far as I know).
I personally use ACF, making a field for every piece of content. It's not pretty, but it's straightforward and fairly foolproof. The drawback is that sometimes an editor wants to simply add an image in a particular spot - it creates an over-reliance on me, the developer, given something so simple.
I'm curious to know how other developers here handle this issue. Any examples / stories / suggestions would be helpful.
Hi Kevin, First page builders plays well with beans, look at this discussion : https://community.getbeans.io/discussion/beaver-builder-and-the-navbar/ I use beaver builder for low budget clients, and i have built for ex a template for restaurants with beans and bb http://modern-resto.webstantly.com/.
Bust most of the time in use ACF with flexible content (or carbon fields) and i can really do what i want with it!
in this project http://pkf.org/our-grants/ i have mixed both, as you can see images are placed in a special way, and that's why i used beaver builder here, as template that i add in a shortcode in a custom field (so not all the page is driven by bb).
But special placements like that can now be handle with the new grid layout and a fall back for ie11, i think now i will do this part with css grid, as mixing cf and bb was sometimes confusing for the client.
Hope it helps
Thanks for the input and examples! Nice restaurant page, btw.
Forgive my poor choice of words - I should have said that page builders don't work well with UIKit (not Beans). BB doesn't use UIKit, not does any page builder I can think of. (I think that YOOtheme has a UIKit page builder, but it's not free and I don't want to pay just to try it out...)
The same sentiment was expressed here: https://community.getbeans.io/discussion/page-builder/. The last comment says it perfectly:
I love Beans because it is so powerful from a programming standpoint... Thing is, clients want WordPress, so I need to be able to deliver custom WordPress themes for them.
For me, the challenge is entirely commercial (not technical). It doesn't have to specifically be a page builder, but I'm struggling to provide a content interface for my less tech-saavy clients.
Use ACF with flexible content build all the modules you need, then the client can drag and drop them on the page where they want, you can also use carbon fields. But for beaver builder, clients don't mind if it use uikit or no beans structure is done with a uikit, and uikit is a fantastic tool to build nice elements, but if you build woth BB and don't use uikit it'\s not a problem. YOu can also build elements and make shortcodes or make widgetized pages and make widgets but the ACF / flex content solution is the easiest one
ACF flexible content, good idea. I'll probably go with this for now, as I rely on UIKit for visual effects and layout through this particular site.
Thanks again for the advice.