A new record week: 26 MRs merged! :D Too much to cover, so going forward, I will only write about the most notable changes.
The simplified zoom interface landed thanks to Jesse “jessebaker” Baker and Gaurav “gauravvvv” — with not only better controls, but also a much smoother UX:
Smooth zoom with pinch and using the slider!
Issue #3464025, image by Jesse.
Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri, Jesse and Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins integrated the existing “undo” functionality with the component props form, resulting in the UX you’d hope:
Your browser does not support playing videos. You can download it instead.
When undoing, the component props form on the right-hand side updates and the preview updates in real-time.Issue #3463618, video by Bálint.
Now that many fundamental pieces exist, it’s time to build upon the foundations that we have. Five weeks ago, Ben added Redux integration to the component props form, resulting in live updates. That started out with a limited set of form elements supported. Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang added support for one more this week: <select>.
SDC prop shapes using enum now work thanks to expanded Redux integration. For example, you can now change the column width.
Issue #3471083, image by Harumi.
(By the way: Bálint’s epic video showing undo/redo above? That’s also powered by the Redux integration!)
Bálint and Gaurav improved the UX by removing six lines of CSS: instead of an abstract placeholder being dragged and visualized in the currently hovered drop target, now a ghost of the component being moved is visible:
Ghost of the component at the drop target: better visualization of what is about to happen.
Issue #3469895, image by me.
Two weeks ago, we gained support for actual trees. This revealed a number of bugs in the UI that had up until that time, been ahead of the back end. Another one of those was squashed this week by Bálint, Ted and I: you can now actually drag components into empty slots :D
Missed a prior week? See all posts tagged Experience Builder.
Goal: make it possible to follow high-level progress by reading ~5 minutes/week. I hope this empowers more people to contribute when their unique skills can best be put to use!
For more detail, join the #experience-builder Slack channel. Check out the pinned items at the top!
Empowering SDC developers
Less visible, but equally important because it boosts the productivity of the fine folks working on the Starshot Demo Design System by making XB be more explicit about what Single-Directory Components (SDCs) prop shapes it provides a complete UX for. Since last week, a sibling Component config entity is auto-generated for every SDC meeting the minimum criteria. This week, Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis expanded the list of criteria:
- Since #3469461, any SDCs that we know for sure won’t work well in XB (yet!) no longer show up in the XB UI. (In more detail: when we have no way to store a particular prop shape yet: XB does not yet support
type: arrayprop shapes yet, for example.) - Since #3470424, SDCs marked as
obsoletewon’t get aComponentconfig entity auto-created. But if it already exists (and hence may be in use), the config entity is not deleted, just disabled.
Evidently that could lead to surprising situations, especially while developing SDCs. So, he’ll be adding a UI that lists the reason for an SDC not being available in XB next.
In the background, back end folks empowering the front end
Ted “tedbow” Bowman helped the back end race ahead of the front end: while we don’t have designs for it yet (nor capacity to build it before DrupalCon if they would suddenly exist), there now is an HTTP API to get a list of viable candidate field properties that are able to correctly populate a particular component prop. These are what in the current XB terminology are called dynamic prop sources 1 2.
Travis “traviscarden” Carden and I made XB’s use of OpenAPI go much further than it did when it landed 3 weeks ago): rather than only validating API response bodies, it now also validates request bodies — hence catching an entire category of bugs on the client-side automatically. Clearer errors = faster iteration!
Week 16 was August 26–September 1, 2024.
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Dynamic Prop Sources are similar to Drupal’s tokens, but are more precise, and support more than only strings, because SDC props often require more complex shapes than just strings. ↩︎
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This is the shape matching from ~3 months ago made available to the client side. ↩︎
