At Ditto, our goal is to make it easy for teams to manage their product text from design all the way to development with a single source of truth. By allowing everyone on a team to access, reference, and reuse the same set of up-to-date content, teams can work faster, reduce copy errors, and increase copy consistency.
From working with hundreds of teams, we’ve realized that, in practice, a “single source of truth” can look different for different teams. Especially for teams at scale, a “single source of truth” might not necessarily mean everyone working out of the same place, at the same time, all the time. Requiring everyone on teams with lots of collaborators to edit the same file can lead to issues like work getting overwritten, limited iteration and exploration, confusion over what’s been updated, and more.
Developers have long combatted these issues using the concept of branching, which allows team members to iterate safely in separate environments that are connected to the main source of truth, and then merge those changes back in one they’re approved. Recently, designers got to experience the same workflow with Figma’s launch of branching.
Time and time again, we've heard from teams that want to use Ditto to manage copy in their Figma branches so they can reap the same benefits of branching for copy. Today, we’re excited to announce Ditto’s new-and-improved integration with Figma branching to enable exactly that! Teams on Figma's Organization or Enterprise plan that are using Figma branching will now have access to version control that’s built for copy in Ditto, so teams of any size — whether 2 or 200 — to maintain a centralized source of copy truth.
When you create a new branch for a file in Figma, you’ll be able to import that directly into Ditto. If you’ve already been working on the main branch of that Figma file in Ditto, you’ll be able to just pick up where you left off — Ditto will bring over existing work for any text that’s the same between the two branches. This includes: Blocks, Components, status, notes, tags, and variants.
As you’re working on the copy in a branch, you’ll be able to take advantage of all of Ditto’s text management features. This includes reusing Ditto content components from your team’s library, creating new content components for reuse, marking text status, tracking edit history, assigning reviewers, suggesting edits, managing variations of copy, and more.
Work you’re doing in the branch project in Ditto won’t affect anything in the Ditto project synced to the main branch, so you’re free to iterate and test changes out.
When the Figma branch is merged, Ditto will take care of everything around making sure that copy gets merged correctly, both in Ditto and the designs. Ditto will make sure your copy stays in-sync with design and development at all times, track all changes, and surface any overrides or conflicts.
After you merge a branch in Figma, the Ditto project corresponding to that branch will get “archived.” This means all the work you did on text in that branch in Ditto — including all change history, comments, and edits — will get preserved. You’ll be able to refer back to all changes, discussions, and decisions made in that branch with full context in the future.
With these updates, teams in Ditto will be able to manage copy on design branches more effectively, so that it’s easier to collaborate on copy at scale:
To get started, just head to your Ditto workspace and import a branch of a Figma file! You can also read our full help guide to learn more.
