In today's digital world, innovation is no longer an option, it's a necessity. As the landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, only companies with the ability to quickly adapt can stay competitive. Therefore, it's imperative to incorporate innovation as the standard within your organization's culture and processes. By doing so, you increase the likelihood of sustained success and demonstrate a commitment to meeting the ever-changing needs of your customers in the digital age.

The Current Status Quo

When developing a website, placeholder text such as 'lorem ipsum' is often used. When working on the Drupal platform, this comes from a submodule Devel. Devel is a suite of modules that provides helper functions, admin pages, and additional development Drush commands to use during web development. Specifically, one of its features is generating fill-in copy which comes in the form of lorem Ipsum text. This is an important tool for developers as they often don’t have access to copy during the build, yet it is needed in order to ensure the layout of the webpage complies with the page's content- so instead they use a placeholder. Typically, a developer would select a page type and amount of content to generate, Devel will add the requested pages to the site and allow developers to view them in various layouts in the backend. For example, you can request 50 blogs, all of which will show lorum ipsum copy, to view the layout options for your insights page.

While this is great, allowing developers to check if content fits, scales, shrinks, etc. to ensure the content is working with the layout of the page, it’s far from foolproof. As you can imagine, the lorum ipsum text is often not comparable to the copy that will eventually be hosted on the page, and having a placeholder that is far from a 1:1 replica leaves room for error. So, Boston Digital thought of a solution- an integration with ChatGPT.

By integrating chat GPT, developers can still generate content for testing purposes but have more relevant content. With the ability to request 10 pages of content consisting of three paragraphs each, ChatGPT is a helpful tool in ensuring that the design and layout are effective. Although ChatGPT's generated content is not what remains on the page, it provides a visual aid for designers to ensure that the layout works well. When looking to test the layout developers can simply ask the integration to generate 10 pages of content that are 3 paragraphs long and it will produce content relevant to the company’s vertical giving a more accurate preview to the final draft.

How Are We Improving It:

The Boston Digital team is improving the Devel module by integrating ChatGPT. We are creating the integration to allow for the customization of content generation according to user input to add relevant content to the Devel module. Our team is not changing any native functionality to the Devel module, rather we are extending it to improve it. This extension allows users to input keywords and go about generating content as usual. But rather than automatically going through the standard method to produce Lorum Ipsum copy, the ChatGPT connector will intersect and plug in your keywords to ChatGPT. It then returns the results and publishes the content based on the AI. When using Devel to connect to ChatGPT, the users’ input of specific keywords and styles will generate more meaningful and natural-sounding content. Unlike the generic filler content that Devel typically generates, ChatGPT's output is more aligned with both industry and topic-specific themes as well as language. Drupal automatically populates temporary pages with the new content, assisting developers and designers in the QA and troubleshooting process. By integrating ChatGPT with Drupal, Boston Digital can now offer a more accurate mock-up version of the website that aligns with the final draft's content. This enhances the overall process for developers, designers, and most importantly the client.

Implementation:

The Drupal plugin system is a powerful extensible, object-oriented tool that allows modules and subsystems to provide functionality. Essentially, the controlling module establishes a basic framework or interface, and other modules create plugins that implement the interface to add specific behaviors. In order to integrate ChatGPT into Devel, we can leverage Drupal's plug-in framework to extend the functionality of the service. By contributing it back as a sub-module of the Devel ecosystem, we can create screens for users to configure ChatGPT, obtain an API key, and ensure that it's communicating correctly. This will help users build pages based on ChatGPT functionalities, bringing together two services to create a more powerful tool.

Why Is This Important:

This integration of using more advanced and representative content instead of lorum ipsum will greatly benefit the web development process. The AI-generated content enables an almost 1:1 preview of the website which can help to speed up the build process. For the UX team and designers, this integration will allow for early detection of any issues. They are able to stress test mockups earlier in the process by turning them into HTML and utilizing the connector for accuracy checks allowing developers to fast-track the build.

A commonly found issue, for example, occurs when generating names. The lorum ipsum text may be a perfect fit for the card. But when adding the real name, it may be a long or a compound name that now breaks the design and no longer fits in the card. ChatGPT allows users to impute specifications like language or name origins that will more likely mirror the final copy allowing the team to catch issues early.

The implementation gives your team the ability to show clients a more accurate representation of their website through the use of AI-generated content. Clients can see what their website would look like and how it would behave with content that is a representation of their specific vertical, from Higher Education to legal and e-commerce content, providing clients with a sample set of layouts before they even develop their own content. All in all, this integration offers a valuable tool for creating successful and effective mockups that are true representations of the website while eliminating issues typically caught further in the process.

What comes next? After the implementation of ChatGPT, our team at Boston Digital is taking it a step further by leveraging other AI tools such as Stable Diffusion to create temporary images that perfectly match the content and reflect clients' styles, resulting in even more realistic mock-ups. By selecting the desired theme and style, we can generate images that we can seamlessly integrate into the developer version of the site. Boston Digital's tech and marketing fanatics continue to push the boundaries of digital innovation but we wont stop there. At Boston Digital, we're constantly expanding technology to enhance businesses' performance and modernize their path to success.