[meta] Experience builder / layout builder / block module reconciliation

Created on 1 July 2025, 14 days ago

Problem/Motivation

Currently we have:

Block module for controlling full site layout via theme regions.

Layout builder for

  • entity view mode layouts
  • layout builder overrides (per-entity page building)
  • Navigation configuration UI and rendering

    Experience builder for:

    Entity view mode layouts (post-beta)
    Per-entity page building (XB beta soon)
    Full site layout (not sure when this will be released)
    Potentially theme building (not sure when this will be released).

    Drupal CMS also includes the contributed dashboard module, which depend on layout builder: https://www.drupal.org/project/dashboard

    There are a cluster of issues in the XB queue about supporting bc layers and just-in-time migration paths in 🌱 [META] Support component types other than SDC Needs work . This issue is not about that, but about how we reconcile the three layout builders between core and Drupal CMS into ideally only having one.

    There are multiple things to figure out here, so we can/should do most of the discussion planning in sub-issues.

    Steps to reproduce

    Proposed resolution

    Navigation and layout builder: 📌 Remove Layout Builder dependency for the config and rendering of the Navigation sidebar Active

    XB + block module 🌱 Figure out what to do with block UI/regions in core in relation to experience builder Active

    Needs issue: layout_builder for entity view displays + layout builder overrides, + XB.

    Remaining tasks

    User interface changes

    Introduced terminology

    API changes

    Data model changes

    Release notes snippet

🌱 Plan
Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

other

Created by

🇬🇧United Kingdom catch

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Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @catch
  • 🇬🇧United Kingdom catch

    I added existing issues for blocks and and navigation that were already open.

    Layout builder vs. experience builder does not have an issue. There is not much we can do here until experience builder has a stable release, but I think we can think about what it might look like before then.

    e.g. we could move layout builder overrides to a dedicated module in contrib. New sites would be encouraged to use the XB entity field integration, which is the first feature that XB will support when it reaches beta. Existing sites would be able to stay on layout_builder_overrides but there will probably be a way for that to co-exist with XB with a just-in-time migration path. This requires splitting the logic out of layout builder itself but we know that not every site using layout_builder uses it.

    For layout builder entity display mode configuration, for me that is a harder one because I think that feature lives in core, but it will be a big challenge to move experience builder support for this into core as well as it working completely differently. However if we decouple those decisions, layout builder move it to contrib with a plan to bring things into core from XB later - and this would address the duplication problem (triplication if you include field UI manage display) if nothing else.

Production build 0.71.5 2024