Adding Collaborative Capabilities to the Gutenberg Editor with Yjs - Tag1 Team Talk #011

Content collaboration has long been table stakes for content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, but what about real-time peer-to-peer collaboration between editors who need direct interaction to work on their content? The WordPress Gutenberg team has been working with Tag1 Consulting and the community of Yjs, an open-source real-time collaboration framework, to enable collaborative editing on the Gutenberg editor. Currently an experimental feature that is available in a Gutenberg pull request, shared editing in Gutenberg portends an exciting future for editing use cases beyond just textual content.

Yjs is both network-agnostic and editor-agnostic, which means it can integrate with a variety of editors like ProseMirror, CodeMirror, Quill, and others. This represents substantial flexibility when it comes to the goals of WordPress to support collaborative editing and the potential for other CMSs like Drupal to begin exploring the prospect of shared editing out of the box. Though challenges remain to enable truly bonafide shared editing off the shelf in WordPress and Drupal installations, Gutenberg is brimming with possibility as the collaboration with Tag1 continues to bear significant fruit.

In this Tag1 Team Talks episode that undertakes a technical deep dive into how the WordPress community and Tag1 enabled collaborative editing in the Gutenberg editor, join Kevin Jahns (creator of Yjs and Real-Time Collaboration Systems Lead at Tag1), Michael Meyers (Managing Editor at Tag1), and your host Preston So (Editor in Chief at Tag1 and author of Decoupled Drupal in Practice) for an exploration of how CMSs around the landscape can learn from Gutenberg's work to empower editors to collaborate in real-time in one of the most exciting new editorial experiences in the CMS world.