Grafida's Philosophy

Why it exists

Joomla! is an excellent Content Management System. However, its plethora of content management features have made content authoring in the Joomla article edit page fairly painful. This is not a complaint; power comes with complexity, and we – the Joomla community – chose power over simplicity.

Inexperienced users find the tiny content area surrounded by a swarm of inscrutable options utterly bewildering. Experienced users find the tiny content area unusable, having to use external tools for authoring, resulting in excessive copying and pasting. Nobody's happy – which is why we see the overuse (and abuse) of page builders on sites that can't have possibly benefited from using one. They put content first.

You know what else puts content first? Desktop content authoring applications made for WordPress. Remember Windows Live Writer? MarsEdit? What if we could bring that to Joomla? After all, modern Joomla has a rich API which should allow making that possible.

Focused content authoring

The driving force behind Grafida is making content authoring simple but powerful. A title. A big content area. Sit down and work on your words. You need some AI assistance to elucidate your point? Configure it once, and it's right there when you need it. It's like a word processor, but it “speaks” the native data type of your CMS. When you're done, you hit Publish. Spotted a problem? Fix it, hit Publish again. No fuss, no mess, no copy-pasting shenanigans, no stress.

You need to manage your content? Log into your site with your browser. Manage your content with the plethora of options Joomla and its extensions give you. Tell Joomla how to show the article page. Who can edit it. Add OpenGraph images. Work your SEO magic. You don't really need to touch the content for most, if not all, of that anyway.

Content authoring and content management are not mutually exclusive. They work together. Any changes you made in Joomla can be brought back to Grafida for further editing and published back into Joomla without messing up your content management options.

The goal is to use Grafida for distraction-free content authoring, and Joomla itself for content management.

Authoring on the go

Traditionally, authoring content for your Joomla site required a desktop computer. Big screen, big keyboard, a mouse.

Ideas don't come on demand when you sit in front of a desktop or laptop computer. They come as you go about your life. You don't have access to your laptop, or it's impractical to use it.

What is practical to use is your smartphone or tablet. Unfortunately, the nature of Joomla's content authoring only being possible on-line and tied to a login session with a short expiration time made that impractical. Using note-taking or word processor applications to author content on the go introduces a copy-paste, and a reformatting step. Those steps make this workaround feel like a kludge.

Grafida's mobile implementations for iPhone, iPad, and Android flip the problem on its head. What if you can author content on the go, in the native format understood by your site, with rich media, without timeouts, without an Internet connection? You only need an Internet connection for the final step of publishing the content to your site.