Onboard Content Managers

Collaborate with your content team to build an amazing website.

At its core, Prismic is an interface for collaboration between developers and content managers. Developers get a powerful API for web development, and content managers get an intuitive simple app for publishing web pages.

If you’re building a website with Prismic, your content management team will probably have no issues learning the interface. But there are a few things you can do to make sure the hand-off goes smoothly.

Prismic offers a user interface for content managers, but as a developer, you control the user experience. Think about how to model your website content so that management will be intuitive and convenient.

Here are some tips:

• Use tabs to organize content. Internally at Prismic, we often have an “SEO” tab to keep things tidy.
• Use slices and slice screenshots. (Screenshots are only available with Slice Machine.) Content managers tell us they love composing web pages with slices, and screenshots show them exactly what each slice will look like.
• Use slice variations to give editors the freedom to change a slice’s layout or fields. (Variations are only available with Slice Machine.)
• Write human-readable display names. Your types, slices, and fields should have concise, informative names. Avoid names like “h2HexCode,” opting instead for a name like “Font Color.”
• Give a helpful example in your placeholder text. Your placeholder text should be a prompt, like “Select a category.” Don’t use this text for instructions, as it will disappear when the field is filled in.
• Seek a balance between freedom and simplicity for content managers. For example, instead of using a color field, you might provide a select field with a predefined list of on-brand colors.
• Use content relationships for common structures, like authors and categories, but avoid creating confusion by over-using them. For example, consider whether you could use a slice instead of a content relationship. When you do use content relationships, consider using Collections to declutter the document list.

The new Page Builder offers a live-editing experience. Ensure that live editing is enabled and working in the Page Builder so that your content team can see life renders of your slices as they write.

Previews allow content managers to see what their content will look like before they hit Publish. Make sure your website has previews configured and working properly. Then, explain previews and shareable previews to your content team and encourage them to preview every change before they publish it. This is the best way to avoid design problems and help your team understand how editing works in Prismic.

Do a walk-through of the Prismic interface with your content team. Be sure to cover the essentials:

• Finding a document in the document list
• Editing a document’s fields
• Managing images
• Adding slices to a document
• All of the available slices
• How to request a new slice from your dev team
• Saving a document
• Previewing a document
• Creating a shareable preview
• Creating a release
• Adding a document to a release
• Linking to documents in a release
• Previewing a release
• Translating a document
• Archiving a document
• Browsing document history

Also explain any general web development concepts that might be unclear, such as alt text and SEO.

All Administrators on your repository can see your technical settings like webhooks, API keys, and locales. Most users will never need to access these settings, so you can assign them the role of Writer or Publisher.

If users must have Administrator permission, tell them what settings they can access and what settings they should avoid.

On enterprise plans, you can also assign roles by locale. This helps users to focus on the documents that are relevant to them, avoiding information overload and improving security.

For more information about user roles, visit the Manage Users guide.

Share these resources with your team:

If your types have any unique features, like a custom tagging system or advanced metadata, create documentation in Google Docs or Notion and share it with the team.