I’ve been at Adobe MAX meeting with clients and working with Adobe’s new Digital Publishing Solution (DPS). One of my favorite features of the new DPS is the special attention that has been given to mobile use-cases for publishing content and maintaining application content. This is just a really fancy way of saying that you can now use your iPad to deliver content to DPS, publish in DPS, edit cards and layouts, and even manage users. No longer does app content have to be delivered by someone sitting at a powerful desktop computer.
You can do all of the content management for an app right from your tablet anywhere there is WiFi.
During the conference, I gave a few dozen demos of the workflow for WordPress to DPS. I’ve grown to like the workflow for its simplicity and its capabilities for wild customizations. But for the demos, I’ve focused on content delivery because that is what everyone is concerned about. Sure, it’s great to know how to make the app with DPS, but there are plenty of people to do that for you (like us!), and creating templates is important, but agencies (like us again!) will do that set up. What customers always want to know is how they will populate their content into the app, so I’ve been showing off a few templates that were previously built inside a WordPress instance. But instead of pulling out my incredibly powerful MacBook Pro, I’ve done every demo on my iPad.
Now this was partially born out of necessity. I was in the middle of a crowded room without a table to put my computer down when I started talking to some folks about DPS workflows. But instead of trying to balance a laptop in one hand, I pulled my iPad out and worked through the full solution, from creating a new article, selecting the template and populating content and metadata, delivering into DPS and publishing into my live app.
I love that I can do all of this on my iPad because it makes the process seem accessible to everyone and is very easy. Tap a few buttons here, a few more over there, and BAM, you’ve got a new article in your app.