Front End Editing in WordPress with Barley

Posted: November 26, 2013 Comments

View http://getbarley.com/editor/wp

Front end editing has always been an interesting pain point over the years. WordPress was a fantastic playground for many attempts to solve the problem of separating writing and consumption of your site content. I work with a lot of clients, and it’s usually hit-or-miss when explaining how to manage things. Some clients are used to the concept of an administration area, while others struggle a bit to see how everything ties together.

I sympathize with it, it’s not completely intuitive that these arbitrary text fields in an admin area have an effect on the public-facing side of your website. While we’ve all been swimming in that concept for a very long time, it’s new (and intimidating) to many. Some day long ago a smart person wondered what it would be like to blend the administration and consumption of site content into a cohesive process.

Barley aims to make it the best front end editing workflow WordPress has ever seen, check it out:

I got a chance to play with Barley firsthand and I must admit it’s really well put together. Barley’s roots are in a full blown CMS but this branch into WordPress is, in my opinion, brilliant. I think exposing Barley to the WordPress community will find a lot of resonance with authors looking for a more integrated editing experience. While I’m not so much the target demographic, I really think it’d be enticing to a large number of people looking to remove the edit, preview, edit, preview, publish repetition from their writing. Barley lets you get a true-to-life look at what you post is going to look like when it’s exposed to the world as you’re writing it.

Barley has a couple of licensing options, and a huge goal of the team is to make sure Barley ties in with your theme no matter where it came from. Give it a look if you’re looking to shake up your content editing.

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