Support for “Text” content type

Here are my thoughts about the OA Text Library and how we would use it. Plus a deeper dive into how we would use the plugin at all.

Any text that’s not directly associated with a Project, Employee or Image asset could just be left isolated to the website and entered/edited there. But if it was text content that could be leveraged to other “channels” — About page content comes to mind — it would be convenient for it to be entered/edited as Text Library content in OpenAsset and subsequently synced to WP via the plugin. 

Other leverage-able content might be found on a Contact page, Careers page (job listings), or News/Press page. I don’t yet know what if any of this content my current client would want to leverage elsewhere, except the About page which seems highly likely. Below are a few similar sites I’ve built recently (all architecture firms) that include these sorts of pages. 

https://kennerlyarc.com/
https://saasf.com/
https://www.cmgsite.com/

But I have trouble envisioning how the text (whether associated with Project, Employee, or Text objects) is allotted to the proper fields in WP. I haven’t worked with the plugin yet (I’ve only read the doc), so forgive me if I’m not getting it. But the way my clients typically like to work in WP is by composing pages visually. I set up the edit form for a Project page, for example, and that imposes an overall structure for the page layout. I use the plugin ACF Pro to create the fields, which affords a lot of flexibility. I configure it to allow the content editor to make choices regarding what text or image blocks to put where. My template code then renders the fields in the order they appear in the resulting post object, much of which was decided by the content editor when they created the post. 

I can easily see how this would work with OpenAsset and Images: if all images are synced in bulk, they land in the media library. Then when the editor composes a Project page directly in WP, they can simply choose an image for each image field from the media library as they go. But with text blocks it’s not so clear. Editors would normally enter the text into the fields I’ve defined. If that text comes from OpenAsset, it’s not like they can go select a text block from a pool as they did with the media library for images.

It looks to me like the current plugin doesn’t work for this model. It assumes all layout decisions are made in the template code. Here’s what I think might solve it:

• The plugin provides a “text library” in WP, similar to the media library.
• Sync sends all text items to the WP text library, the same way it sends all images.
• Text that syncs to the text library includes Project and Employee text fields as well as OA Text Library items. That way editors can create a project or employee page in WP by picking and choosing which text and image components go where.
• Text in the WP text library is filterable by “text asset category”, project, and employee, similar to the image library.

What do you think of this design? For me, I can’t see using the current plugin for my clients (almost all architects!) without a significant amount of development on my end, making me wonder whether it wouldn’t be more efficient to use the API. With the WP text library feature described above, I think it would work beautifully.

Finally a related question: I see that assets can be manually synced, or synced automatically according to a frequency setting. What is the granularity of the automatic sync? Does it sync absolutely everything regardless of changes, or only what has been modified? If it’s only what has been modified, will it sync the whole “entity” (Project, Employee, File or Text), or will it sync only the fields that have been modified?

Thank you!
~ Julie

Thank you for the very quick and clear response, and for answering every question I asked. I’m glad to know about image-only syncing — it sounds like that may be our best option for now.