XB week 29: adieu, dizzying drag and drop

It’s hard to imagine, but … until now, Experience Builder’s (XB) live preview of the component tree (not to be confused with XB’s chrome-free preview mode) the content creator is assembling has been very imperfect. This week Dave “longwave” Long, Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins, Jesse Baker, Felix “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis, Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee, Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri and I made it just slightly imperfect:

Jesse, Bálint, Gaurav “gauravvv”, Chris “cosmicdreams” Weber and Kristen Pol made an (unintentionally) trippy experience in Experience Builder less dizzying. 😵‍💫😅 From:

To:

As promised last week, this week the approach we landed on for the xb_page content entity type (aka “landing pages”) got properly documented in an Architecture Decision Record (ADR): see docs/page-entity-type.md for all glorious details 🤓 Kudos to Matt “mglaman” Glaman, Ted “tedbow” Bowman, Lauri, John “johnwebdev”, Pamela “pameeela” Barone, Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein, danielveza, Bálint and Dave for making this happen!

Actual saving

Last week, we introduced the server-side support for saving your XB creations, this week Lauri, Jesse and Lee did the client-side part: a “Publish” button that saves it. This is only going to be short-lived though: we expect to replace this with listing all auto-saved changes and allowing you to publish them all at once.

Storybook

XB adopted Storybook this week for its UI components, thanks to Atul “soaratul” Dubey, Tina Rey and Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri — which means that we’re starting to have a nice overview of all XB’s UI components (not to be confused with XB Components! 🤓). XB has a whole range of UI components: borrowed & unmodified from Radix, borrowed & modified, and completely custom. Anything that’s in either of the last two will should be available in Storybook.

Grab bag

• Jesse, Dave and I updated the XB UI to always use the “official” name of the component, and removed the (only partially implemented) ability to name each component instance. Less confusion, more consistency, less complexity.
• Ben, Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang and Jesse found (and fixed, of course) the root cause for why unexpected (and incorrectly!) loaded CSS assets were loaded into the XB UI — turns out that once again the #1945262: Replace custom weights with dependencies in library declarations; introduce “before” and “after” for conditional ordering Drupal core issue would have prevented this problem — and that’s a core issue I first commented on 11.5 years ago 😅😮‍💨
• Jesse, Ted and Bálint adapted our existing end-to-end test suite to account for the basic auto-saving we landed six weeks ago — until now, the (obviously automatic) auto-saving had been explicitly disabled for these tests, to keep the scope manageable. Now the end-to-end test suite is once again testing the actual XB experience 😊

Week 29 was November 25–December 1, 2024.