Not every marketer knows how to code, but they do need a website. For them, a technology like Site Studio is a boon. It is a low-code Drupal website builder that provides a visual user interface (UI) for building and maintaining Drupal websites. Previously known as Cohesion, with Site Studio, users can create page layout templates, content entity templates, views templates, and other aspects of their website theme using a simple drag-and-drop user interface.
It makes it possible to create and design websites in Drupal without writing code in PHP, HTML, or CSS. Thus empowering designers, content creators, and marketers, who are not Drupal experts, to quickly create beautiful new sites.
With the entire control of colors, font, headers-footers, and everything in between, it dramatically improves how marketers manage their brands.
This also expedited the time-to-market greatly. It has enough tutorial videos and documentation to support the growth of the learning curve for the dedicated learners. In this blog we’ll cover the benefits as well as the limitations of Site Studio and guide on creating a landing page using the components.
Meant to accelerate the marketers, there are multiple reasons as to why Acquia Site Studio is better than Vanilla Drupal. Listed below are the few major advantages it has.
In Drupal, to create a block type/paragraph type, one needs to have a specific Twig file for the markup. Now, based on the markup and design, we need to write CSS rules to create a card component.
In Site Studio, to build a card component, we can have the template of the card along with the CSS properties within the component. Using its drag-and-drop feature, we can use predefined elements like image, text, and link and create a layout for the card. Components have a ‘Properties’ tab, where we can control the look of the component. All this is done without writing a single line of code.
In Drupal, we’ll have to create interactivity components like a slider or an accordion. We need to create Twig and also include the Javascript libraries and custom Javascript. On top of that add custom style for it.
In Site Studio, there are lists of interactivity components that can be used to create any kind of element like tabs, sliders. It does not require any Javascript libraries for it. It provides a list of components, the building block of any websites/apps. These components can be easily dragged and dropped. These give you the interface to consume the data. Site Studio gives you a fine-tuned editor to design interface for the user and form for editors.
Site Studio provides an in-site configuration form that takes care of your branding requirements. You can add your branding elements like fonts, colors, icons, grid settings, SCSS variables, etc. directly onto the site. And there is no need to make any changes in the theme folder as well as the theme settings, unlike Drupal. Your basic frontend settings would be handy to you and you can modify them directly from the site without asking for help from a developer.
Drupal has the same type of layout and content for a page. For every page, we need to create content and add blocks which is a time-consuming task and the chances of a mistake are very high. Also, it required too much back and forth in case of a change in the feature of a block and layout.
In Site Studio, the helper feature allows you to make duplicate functions that allow users to add the same component and layout multiple times in a template. This eases a tedious task when multiple components’ functionality needs to be tested. Also, it saves a lot of time when adding the same component every time and also reduces the testing efforts.
Gutenberg and Layout Builder from Drupal 8 are some of the worthy competitors of Site Studio. However, it has an edge over the other with its “what it can do” with no code capability. Also, as already described it holistically expedites the time-to-market of building the website. It is a more all-in-one solution that becomes even more effective by conforming to the needs of varying skill set levels.
This feature provides a setting to enhance styles for your site. you can create/modify the site. It also provides settings to update the base style or to create custom styles. Example link heading, links, Blockquotes. Also, You can create a custom style that can be used anywhere on the site.
All-in-all, the Site Studio builder is the solution that is meant to change the face websites are built-in. It gives you the ability to build faster and benefits everyone, right from the developers to marketers and even the end-users. Meant to solve the common overhead problems, this encourages a faster time-to-market, thus helping you meet with the stringent competitions with enough documentation as support.