XB week 8: design locomotive gathering steam

Last week was very quiet, July 1–7’s #experience-builder Drupal Slack meeting was even more tumbleweed-y…

… but while that was very quiet, the Acquia UX team’s design locomotive was getting started in the background, with two designs ready-to-be-implemented posted by Lauri “lauriii” Timmanee — he’s working with that team to get his Experience Builder (XB) product vision visualized:

1. #3458503: Improve the page hierarchy display — with Gaurav “Gauravvvv” enthusiastically jumping on it!
2. #3458863: Add initial implementation of top bar

On top of that, a set of placeholder issues was posted — choices to be made that need user research before an informed design can be crafted:

• #3459088: Define built-in components and categorization for components
• #3459229: Allow saving component compositions as sections
• #3459234: Allow directly creating/editing entity title and meta fields
• #3459098: Define strategy for keyboard shortcuts
• #3459236: Redirect users directly to Experience Builder when creating new content or editing content

More to come on the design front! :)

Speaking of design, Hemant “guptahemant” Gupta and Kristen “kristenpol” Pol are volunteering on behalf of their respective employers to implement the initial design system prior to DrupalCon Barcelona.

Front end

• Jesse “jessebaker” Baker landed an important refactor (#3456946: Refactor Preview.tsx React component to prevent duplicate backend calls), with reviews from Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins and Lee “larowlan” Rowlands
• Jesse also landed a small foundational piece of the UI: #3458723: Implement context menu for hovered component, which also is a crucial stepping stone for future accessibility work
• Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang got #3456084: Add initial implementation of primary menu landed and filed the follow-up #3458617: Close menu on drag in primary menu — which subsequently spawned an interesting discussion about the design between Jesse and Lauri
• Jesse got #3459235: Implement front-end (React) routing library going, with enthusiastic participation from Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri and Ronald “roaguicr” Aguilar
• Having observed environment setup issues for some, Ben opened #3458369: DDEV support for Cypress tests after witnessing how painful it was for Jesse to get Cypress talking to Drupal inside DDEV

Front-end starting points for contributing to XB

Jesse reported two bugs that would be excellent starting points for contributing to XB:

• #3459333: Undo/redo - user can undo the loading of the initial state (regression)
• #3458535: Middle click + drag doesn’t work correctly if middle click is inside preview iframe

And Lauri added a feature request that builds on top of the aforementioned foundational UI piece Jesse & Ben landed (#3459249: Allow opening the contextual menu by right clicking a component) — that too is a great entry point.

Back end

And, finally, on the back-end side:

• Ted “tedbow” Bowman pushed forward #3456008: Add support for matching SDC prop shape: {type: string, enum: …} but got stuck. He opened #3458580 as a blocker … and upon my return that Friday, I discovered that actually … that was working correctly, but the implementation was very confusing — not surprising, considering this code dated back to a PoC branch from the chaotic origins. So, instead, the logic was made a lot clearer, with better comments. If you’re interested in the deepest parts of how Drupal handles structured data, you’ll probably find it an intriguing commit. ¹
• I’d missed it the previous week, but Lee actually did a huge push forward on #3454519: [META] Support component types other than SDC, by turning a high-level concept into a concrete proposal in the form a massive draft MR, with lots of interesting concepts, all rooted in his real-world experience with Layout Builder. An interesting discussion between Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein and Lee ensued :)

Thanks to Lauri for reviewing this!

Week 8 was July 1–7, 2024.