XB week 6: diagrams & meta issues

1.5 week prior, Lee “larowlan” + Jesse fixed a bug in the undo/redo functionality and added the first unit test (#3452895), and added it to CI (where it now runs immediately, no need to wait for composer to run JS unit tests!) Except … the unit tests didn’t actually run — oops! Rectifying that revealed a whole range of new Cypress challenges, which Ben “bnjmnm” worked tirelessly to solve this during the entire 5th week, and it was merged on Wednesday of this week :)

Anybody who has contributed to the drupal.org GitLab CI templates knows how painful this can be!

As alluded to in last week’s update, I’m shifting my focus to coordinating.

That, together with quite a few people being out or preparing for webinars or Drupal Dev Days Burgas means this is an unusually short update — also because I left on vacation on Friday the 21st of June.

Before going on vacation, I wanted to ensure work could continue in my absence because we need to get to the point where Lauri’s vision is accessible in both UX wireframe form (Lauri’s working on that with Acquia UX) and technical diagram form (up to me to get that going). So, since last week:

1. Lauri created #3454094: Milestone 0.1.0: Experience Builder Demo. I created #3455753: Milestone 0.2.0: Experience Builder-rendered nodes. Anything that is not necessary for either of those two should not be worked on at this time. They together form “the early phase” — the milestone 0.1.0 has a hard DrupalCon Barcelona 2024 deadline in September, the 0.2.0 does not have a similar firm date.
2. As much of 0.2.0 as possible should already be in 0.1.0, which means ideally the back end is ahead of the front end. That’s what #3450586: [META] Early phase back-end work coordination and #3450592: [META] Early phase front-end work coordination. are for. I did a big update to have the next ~10 or so back-end things to build spelled out in detail in concrete issues, with vaguer descriptions for the things that are further out and subject to change anyway.
3. Initial diagram of the data model as currently partially implemented and the direction we’ve been going in … followed by a significant expansion of detail. You can see the diagrams on GitLab, in the docs/diagrams directory.
4. The JSON-based data storage model is influenced significantly by some of the product requirements, and what those are and their exact purpose has not been very clear. To fix that, I created [later phase] [META] 7. Content type templates — aka “default layouts” — affects the tree+props data model (which updates the data model diagram!) — and Lauri recorded a video with his thinking around this, in which he walks through two diagrams: one for data sources + design system, one that breaks down a concrete content type.
5. A lot of discussion happened between Lauri, catch and I on [META] Configuration management: define needed config entity types, which needs a lot more clarity before all config entity types can be implemented.

One pretty cool issue landed this week that drives home that second item : #3455898: Connect client & server, with zero changes to client (UI): rough working endpoints that mimic the UI’s mocks — thanks to that, the PoC UI is now optionally populated by the first article node, unless you enable development mode (see ui/README.md), then it uses dummy data not served by Drupal. A small but hacky change but an important pragmatic step in the right direction :) And it unblocks Jesse on next steps on the UI!

Weeks 7 and 8 will be special editions: I will have been completely absent during week 7 (plus, it’ll be Drupal Dev Days!), and present only for the last day of week 8. I’ll catch up what happened and do a write-up both for myself as well as all of you!

Thanks to Lauri for reviewing this!