Drupal

The typical post-DrupalCon slow week — from travel woes to taking some time off, to passing on learnings to the rest of the team. But there’s still some interesting things to note this week 😊

The funny bug fixed with one line of HTML

During DrupalCon, Chris “cosmicdreams” Weber spotted a funny edge case we somehow hadn’t triggered during development: after placing a component using Experience Builder (XB), using the component props form to specify values and pressing Enter, no it actually submits the form, because that’s what forms do! But in this case, it is not meant to be submitted: the preview is updated live and saving will (eventually) happen automatically.

DrupalCon week! On Monday, we landed the last issue to achieve the 0.1 milestone: The XB annotations and labels should not change size when zooming — thanks Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”, Atul “soaratul” Dubey and Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri for guiding it across the finish line!

That was the only noteworthy commit of the week, because of Acquia’s team working full-time on Experience Builder (XB), Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins, Jesse “jessebaker” Baker, Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee and Bálint (he helped us achieve 0.1 on Monday and traveled on Tuesday!) were attending DrupalCon. Also at DrupalCon was Dave “longwave” Long, who we’re sponsoring part time.

So it was with a lot of satisfaction that I tagged the 0.1.0-alpha1 release on the morning of the DriesNote :)

Last week ended with 12 remaining issues. Did we make it? 😅

Major loose ends

Like last week, I’m starting with the major loose ends.Thanks to the impressive work by Dang “sea2709” Tran and the reviews and guidance from Jesse “jessebaker” Baker as well as many others, Experience Builder (XB) now has a robust solution for previewing components when hovering them in the “insert” menu. It required both server-side changes (global theme asset libraries were missing previously) and client-side changes (shadow DOM didn’t offer sufficient isolation; we needed <iframe>). 
The result is so nice that I almost spat out my coffee because of a deep, unavoidable “OOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!” when reviewing it! 😁

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 “lauriii” Timmanee 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:

We matched last week’s record: again 26 MRs merged! 🚀

Experience Builder (XB) already had a hierarchy view for a while. Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee worked with the Acquia UX team to change that to match the more common “layers” pattern (used in Photoshop and Figma). Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang made that a reality:

A new record week: 26 MRs merged! :D Too much to cover, so going forward, I will only write about the most notable changes.

The simplified zoom interface landed thanks to Jesse “jessebaker” Baker and Gaurav “gauravvvv” — with not only better controls, but also a much smoother UX:

Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri, Jesse and Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins integrated the existing “undo” functionality with the component props form, resulting in the UX you’d hope:

Monday August 19, 2024 definitely was a milestone:

How does cta1href sound to you? Gibberish, right? :D
Jesse “jessebaker” Baker pointed out that Experience Builder (XB) in its current state was subjecting its users to such nonsense! Fortunately, thanks to every Single Directory Component (SDC) specifying a title for each prop, we were able to automatically generate the much more readable CTA 1 link — thanks to foundations Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins did in #3461422 from 3 weeks prior.

Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” and Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande eliminated an extraneous “preview” request from the client, hence improving performance (as well as sanity).

The first prominent leap forward this week was built by Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang: they added the ability to Experience Builder (XB) to first pick the location to add a component to, and then pick the component, rather than only the other way around:

Clearly, it’s important to support both paths towards placing a component!

The back-end heart of Experience Builder (XB) is its two-property field type. Thanks to Ted “tedbow” Bowman, the tree field property is now strictly validated, which is essential to ensure both data integrity and the ability to evolve the codebase rapidly and confidently. Crucially, this validation constraint is used to validate both content and configuration, just like the validation that was added in week 10.