XB week 18: DriesNote deadline

With DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 only two weeks later, the focus this week is on tying up loose ends. That already started last week, but of the milestone 0.1.0 priorities that product lead Lauri identified, 15 are still left after last week: we need to fix 1.5/day to get to zero.

Major loose ends

I titled last week’s update drag and drop party because there were so many improvements on that front. But one critical piece was still missing: it was painful to drag components into locations that are difficult to visualize: top and bottom of slots, even more so for adjacent slots. Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri brought one additional improvement:

Beautiful isn’t it?! I couldn’t say it better than Jesse “jessebaker” Baker in his review: This is such a marked improvement and honestly it’s already better than I dared hope it would be, especially this early. Excellent work.

Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins finished the highest-impact loose end: he ensured all single-value field types work correctly.

This week, Ben finally had the chance to introduce sorely needed end-to-end (E2E) test coverage, which ensures that a whole range of field widgets work as expected not only in the original field widget sense (focus on server side), but also the live update sense (focus on client side): the Redux integration must be aware of when the values the user is typing is valid. More work remains to be done there, but the introduction of the prop-types.cy.js E2E Cypress test marks a significant milestone! ¹ Next steps will be tracked in the corresponding meta/plan issue.

Lots of usability bugs squashed

Jesse coordinated the squashing of many usability bugs — not really broken things, but things that should happen to not have a clunky UX:

• Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande and Jesse: #3470933: Close the insert panel when clicking outside the panel — why force the users to do extra clicking when we can close something when user actions indicate a UI piece is not currently necessary?
• Amine “boulaffasae” Boulaffass and Bálint: #3472634: Component List doesn’t scroll — when installing additional Single Directory Components (SDCs), the list can grow beyond the viewport height and this fix allows accessing those :D
• Gaurav “gauravvvv”, Shyam “shyam_bhatt” Bhatt and Bálint: #3472488: The preview container height will overflow outside the canvas — a fixed canvas size prevented building tall pages!
• Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” and fazilitehreem expanded upon the right-click support they added last week: #3472053: Show context menu on right clicking components in the Layers panel — because what is possible on the canvas/in the preview, should also be possible in the “layers” panel

Back-end improvements

• Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis landed the most important server-side change of the week: surfacing the reason for an SDC not being available in XB. This is obviously critical information for SDC developers. More needs to happen in this space, but this in particular is a huge productivity boost for the people working on the Starshot Demo Design System, because that too will be featured in the Driesnote at DrupalCon Barcelona :)

• Ted “tedbow” Bowman and Dave “longwave” Long made the most critical response a CacheableJsonResponse instead of a JsonResponse, which means it can now be served by Drupal’s Dynamic Page Cache while guaranteeing up-to-date information. Similar to the “component list scroll” bug fix above, this was only perceptible with many SDCs installed (and Xdebug enabled), but it still is an important leap forward. ²
• Deepak “deepakkm” Mishra, Ted and I added support for propless SDCs — a silly oversight :D
• Finally, I clarified the “shape matching bits” by improving the docs, code organization (it dates back to the earliest XB days!), making its location and experimental nature more explicit in the CODEOWNERS file, and introducing a Shape matching issue queue component. ³

Unfortunately, during the week, Lauri prioritized several more issues, so we ended this week with … 12 — only 3 fewer than we started with :/ That means we’ll need to land >2/day in the next week to get to zero. Fortunately, most of those twelve are already pretty far along.

Who of you have ever been able to chill towards a deadline, and how did you do that? :D

Week 18 was September 9–15, 2024.