XB week 2: outlines emerging

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.

On the code front, Alex Pott (who initially proposed a different repository structure in #3446374, see last week’s post) nudged XB in a better direction: over the weekend, he provided an MR to reuse core’s PHPCS rules and +1’d the structure we settled on. I finished & merged what he started and am grateful for the result :)

On Tuesday, front-end lead Jesse’s MR to carve rough outlines of the UI (no premature detail while awaiting more detailed wireframes and interaction design) was merged, and introduced the Radix UI component library that Lauri recommended.

SDC is a foundation of XB, and while SDC recently left the experimental phase in Drupal core, it is itself still evolving. An example is #3390712, where work is happening to introduce the concept of component variants. On Wednesday, e0ipso, Christian “penyaskito” and pdureau started pushing that forward.

That same day, I pushed the commit that introduced a new FieldType plugin that actually implements Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein’s proposed data model in #3440578.
An interesting suggestion on the proposal came from Matt “mglaman” Glaman: to implement this as a single field with 2 properties plus 1 computed property for the combined result … which matched my thinking exactly! I implemented it on Friday. More work to be done next week to get it to a mergeable state, and much more beyond that (nested component trees, (a)symmetric translations, easy querying and hence easy updates …)

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From the flurry of activity above, a few outlines start to merge:

• with squinting eyes: the silhouette of a UI
• similarly: the data model as envisioned months ago by effulgentsia
• things happening outside XB that are relevant to it, with people not just from Acquia, Lullabot and PreviousNext, but the beginning of far wider involvement ¹ — globe-spanning even!

Which seamlessly brings us to the next highlight of the week: the very first asynchronous XB meeting in Drupal Slack, organized by Griffyn “griffynh” Heels on Thursday. After 24 hours ², the discussion gets archived in a d.o issue (#3449517).
This first meeting had 24 participants (with <150 people in the #experience-builder channel: 1 in 6!), I’d say this was a success :)
One pattern stood out: people are eager to contribute, but don’t know how yet. The honest answer is: we’re figuring that out — there is a list of product requirements, a codebase of <1 week old targeting those requirements and Lauri’s concept wireframes from September 2023. Contributors are welcome already, and can have a huge influence on the direction and shape of XB, but at this time need to be comfortable with helping to make things more concrete.

At the end of the week, I met with pdureau ³, talking about the UI Suite Initiative he’s been pushing for years now. Deeply integrated design system support in XB is crucial per Lauri’s research, and that’s exactly where the people behind the UI Suite initiative have gained a lot of expertise — and a working codebase that has ~20 frequent contributors and ~80 contributors over the past year! UI Suite explicitly supports for the various artifact types that design systems consists of, and XB will need to support these too. As the tech lead for XB but somebody who has never used design systems, it’s important for me to listen & learn. So I mostly listened.
The UI Suite ecosystem is currently transitioning to build on top of SDC. e0ipso and pdureau have been enthusiastically collaborating on this, and their enthusiasm is now positively visible in the XB Slack channel too! How exactly UI Suite will influence XB is not yet clear, but it likely will.

Goal for next week: connect conceptual dots that today exist only in the heads of people who’ve been in sufficient meetings with Lauri.

Thanks to Lauri for reviewing this!