Problem/Motivation
We live in an exciting time for drupalers. New generations display builders, based on SDC, are coming, and
Experience Builder →
is currently discussed to be included in a future version of Drupal CMS.
However, when Experience Builder will be released (late spring 2025 at best), it will face the current state of existing SDC themes: messy templating, bad UI logic, incomplete or incorrect definitions... They are kind of OK for low-level Twig templates manipulation, but they are not good enough for display building tools like XB, with dynamic previews and typed data injection.
I noticed that because we will ship
UI Patterns 2 →
very soon.
Like Experience Builder, UI Patterns 2 is based on SDC and expects correctly built SDC components to make them work with Drupal API, in Drupal UI. But it is not a new display builder, it converts SDC components to configurable plugins (blocks, layouts, formatters...) to be used with existing display builders (Manage Display, Layout Builder, Paragraph Layout, Views...):
I have created many issues to help SDC theme owners about those problems:
But they are not enough because, as previously stated, without display building, there is not so much incentive to change code which is good enough when calling components only from Twig templates (node.html.twig, block.html.twig, field.html.twig...).
So, we need a solution to prepare the ecosystem to avoid such disappointment.
Proposed resolution
UI Patterns 2 is nearly ready, the first Release Candidate is planned for Christmas, final 2.0.0 is planned for January.
Including UI Patterns 2 in Drupal CMS, as soon as January 2025 will allow:
- SDC-based themes owners to adapt their components to make them work with display building tools
- also, it will teach Drupal CMS users (site builders or content contributors) to
manipulate SDC components from the UI they are already comfortable with (blocks, layouts, formatters, views..). It will educate them about the philosophy, and they will only have to learn the (superior) UI/UX when Experience Builder will be available.
So it will be more comfortable and progressive change management.
We believe UI Patterns 2 has the quality level expected for Drupal CMS:
- is a module in development since mid 2023, built by a team strong of 8 years of experience in working with UI Components and design systems in Drupal, and led by me, pdureau, co-maintainer of SDC in Core.
- is already used in production by agencies since September 2024, with tremendous success. It is already covered by 94 phpunit tests and the code coverage is still growing.
- has no documentation yet, but will be fully documented, using the new Drupal documentation system, in the next 3 weeks.
- has only one packagist dependency, which is already a soft dependency of Drupal Core (for JSON API & SDC), and the only packagist dependency of Experience Builder
- has many features suitable for Core inclusion:
🌱
[Meta] List of related core issues
Active
. We will propose them for Drupal 11.2
- has a Release Candidate issue to check compatibility with XB :
📌
[2.0.0-rc1] Compatibility with XB
Active
. It is a very small issue, we are confident we will get along.
What do you think about this proposal??
