Monday was a U.S. holiday, which meant I was able to go full-steam ahead on the storage MR for Experience Builder (XB) that I started the prior week. On Tuesday, I continued that work, and spun off a second MR that allows changing the source type and source value … for which I shared a 2.5-minute screencast in #experience-builder late on Tuesday.

In it, you’ll see a hacky-as-hell UI. It’s currently named TwoTerribleTextAreasWidget to convey in no uncertain terms that this is throwaway code :D Its purpose: help stand up infrastructure and get the back-end pieces in place to power the UI (see last week’s screenshot), which is currently using hardcoded data.

Experience Builder (XB) must be able to render single directory components (SDC) … but really any component. Furthermore, to achieve the compromiseless UX we want, we’ll need both client-side and server-side rendering (to avoid network latency): isomorphic rendering. So on Monday May 20, Ben “bnjmnm”, Mateu “e0ipso”, Lee “larowlan”, Théodore “nod_”, Pierre “pdureau” and Tim met in a truly global meeting (from Lee’s Australia to Kris’ U.S. West Coast), with very interesting conclusions.
These are not current concerns for XB, but they will eventually be — this was early alignment to avoid wasting time.

Acquia is sponsoring me full-time to operate as the tech lead for Experience Builder — thanks!

Dries announced the formal start of the Experience Builder initiative at DrupalCon Portland 2024, on May 6. Shortly before DrupalCon, Drupal core product manager Lauri already shared the findings of the deep & wide research he conducted in prior months, which resulted in a set of 64 requirements.

On behalf of Acquia I’m currently working on Drupal’s next big leap: Automatic Updates & Project Browser — both are “strategic initiatives”.

So what was DDD Ghent like?

Statistics

• 137 issues across all projects
• 52 of the 137 (38%) for core, of which 7 already fixed
• 19 of the 52 (37% of core, or 14% of total) on CKEditor 5, 3 already fixed (all discovered at DDD, 2 of which for upgrade path)
• 16 of the 19 discovered at DDD

I’m especially interested in sprinting on the CKEditor 5 module for Drupal core, since that’s what I am currently working on for Acquia, because that is one of the biggest must-haves/blockers for Drupal 10. 86% of issues worked on at DDD Ghent was not CKEditor 5, so … I’m hoping others will do blog posts similar to this one! :D

Together with zrpnr, gabesullice, lauriii, bnjmnm, yashrode and hooromoo in Acquia’s Drupal Acceleration Team, I’ve been working on getting Drupal on CKEditor 5, because CKEditor 4 is reaching the end of its long and productive life.

zrpnr got it started in January 2021. We’ve been meeting with Reinmar ¹ from the CKEditor 5 team to ensure a smooth automatic upgrade path from CKEditor 4: all functionality should be even better! Less than 10 months later, on November 11, 2021, CKEditor 5 was committed to Drupal 9.3!