The first prominent leap forward this week was built by Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang: they added the ability to Experience Builder (XB) to first pick the location to add a component to, and then pick the component, rather than only the other way around:
Hovering a section (XB calls top-level components sections) now offers placing another section and triggers the component list form.Clearly, it’s important to support both paths towards placing a component!
Great news: this week, Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri joined the team working on XB full-time :) Satisfyingly, he landed an improvement that he started working on as a volunteer contributor: #3458535: Middle click + drag doesn’t work correctly if middle click is inside preview iframe.
Utkarsh “utkarsh_33”, syeda-farheen, Harumi and Jesse “jessebaker” Baker fixed the undo/redo functionality and added end-to-end tests, ensuring that XB cannot regress anymore on that essential functionality.
Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins and I collaborated to overhaul XB’s all-props test-only Single-Directory Component (SDC), whose purpose is solely to exercise the full spectrum of prop shapes (JSON schemas) that SDC can use:
The all-props test-only SDC facilitates testing/developing missing pieces of XB: it makes it easy to see the editing UX that is generated for a particular SDC prop shape.Last week, we landed component previews, and that was a big leap forward! We firmly believe in rapid iteration, and landing something as soon as it’s at least partially usable, rather than polishing it to perfection — for a mature codebase like Drupal core that makes sense, but not for something that is still in its infancy, like XB. So, unsurprisingly, we found an (obvious) bug: the preview caused styles to bleed:
Notice how pink outlines appear everywhere as soon as the Hero component is previewed — that’s obviously not the intent! :DJesse, Utkarsh and Gaurav “gauravvvv” used shadow DOM to properly encapsulate this.
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!
Back during week 3, Lee “larowlan” Rowlands opened an issue to create an OpenAPI spec for the (then) mock HTTP responses. Back then, the client (React, JS) and server (PHP, Drupal module) were being developed completely independently. Because things were still moving so rapidly back then, some request or response shape was changing almost daily, and nobody had OpenAPI experience … it sadly didn’t become a priority.
then, in the past ~5 or so weeks, having an OpenAPI spec that both the mocks and the actual server responses were validated against would have prevented several problems, and would have boosted productivity.
Thankfully, Philip “pfrilling” Frilling had already gotten significant parts working (and he was able to reuse Lee’s work on the Decoupled Layout Builder API module!). It was not yet mergeable because it didn’t validate the actual server responses yet.
So I started pushing it forward and ran into PHP dependency hell, was able to fix that, and then got us onto OpenAPI 3.1.0 (instead of 3.0.0), enabling XB’s openapi.yml to use patternProperties, without which we actually cannot express all of XB’s response shapes.
Hurray! A whole class of productivity blockers gone! (And Lee was right all along, of course.)
Last week’s StorablePropShape worked okay, but Ted “tedbow” Bowman’s work on #3446722: Introduce an example set of representative SDC components; transition from “component list” to “component tree” revealed an interesting edge case: JSON object keys are always strings, so 50 is encoded as '50', meaning … the type is changed, and information is lost. Fortunately, Drupal core solved this a decade ago: we (re)discovered Drupal core’s ::storageSettingsFromConfigData(), which was added for precisely this purpose! A simple fix by Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” later, and we were good to go :)
That wasn’t the only problem #3446722 surfaced: we figured out why exactly the JSON schema validation refused to accept a sample value generated by Drupal core’s uri field type … and it turns out that’s simply because that field type indeed generates invalid URIs! We worked around it by swapping the class and overriding the logic to generate valid sample values. 1
In other words: matching the SDC props’ type information (expressed as JSON schema) against Drupal’s Typed Data/Entity/Field/Field Property type information (expressed as DataType plugins + validation constraints) is definitely revealing interesting problems that probably nobody else has been running into :D
P.S.: we set a new record by a significant margin this week: 16 MRs merged!
Week 13 was August 5–11, 2024.
We’ll eventually create upstream issues in Drupal core, but first we’re working accumulating a range of these kinds of problems, to identify the best strategy to fix this upstream. We’re now at ten overrides for field type classes, for a variety of reasons — most for missing validation constraints and/or incorrect field property class implementations. ↩︎
Hovering a section (a top-level component) now offers placing another section and triggers the component list form.The all-props test-only SDC facilitates testing/developing missing pieces of XB: it makes it easy to see the editing UX.Notice how pink outlines appear everywhere as soon as the Hero component is previewed.This week was all about catching up on notifications and open PRs from last week, and creating a mega amount of new PRs.
Dries Buytaert announced recently that the product name for the result of the Drupal Starshot Initiative will be Drupal CMS. Exciting! Activities on features for Drupal CMS are divided into tracks - a set of deliverables focused to provide valuable solutions for different parts of the product strategy.
Let’s see what’s cooking in the Drupal CMS kitchen as since the announcement of the track leads, quite some work has been done. We are happy to share a brief overview to highlight the progress made!
The Events Track has been busy with transferring the Events recipe to the Drupal CMS and now we’ve got the beginnings of an event system. As with all the Drupal CMS components, the ultimate plan is for each one to be available as its own project, but at the same time all be developed within the same repo.
The Data Privacy / Compliance Track is busy developing a survey for the international audience. We are looking forward to sharing it with the community very soon.
The Trial Experience Track in coordination with the Drupal Association has devised a solution to leverage GitLab Pages. After checking in with the rest of the Drupal CMS team, it was decided the trial codebase would be added to the monolithic repository. You can find more details at the dedicated blog post by Matt Glaman.
The Starshot Demo Design System initiative is supporting the Experience Builder demo next month by providing Drupal-branded components within a design system theme. The team has made excellent progress and needs more help in the next two weeks to test components within Experience Builder. Learn how to get involved!
The SEO Track managed to add Basic SEO recipe to Drupal CMS. This recipe will be applied by default, is idempotent (can be applied multiple times), and sets the simple best practices configuration we feel every site needs. The team is continuing to work to define an advanced SEO recipe that we will propose to be optional that has more tools for optimizing for search engines.
The Advanced Search Track has drafted a proposal for the track. It is being reviewed by the leadership team and the idea is to provide a recipe for at least two different approaches and collect community feedback. We expect this to happen in September so stay tuned!
The Media Management Track is undertaking discovery to gather common practices and new insights that will lead to a proposal for the features and recipes for media in early versions of Drupal CMS. The track will also propose how improvements and innovations could look for media beyond the launch of Drupal CMS. Tony Barker has created a survey as part of the discovery and welcomes the community to provide their thoughts and feelings on media in Drupal using this form.
We are observing the progress each track team is making with excitement and will keep you up to date on upcoming developments!
PORTLAND, Ore., 29 August 2024—The Drupal Association is pleased to announce Dropsolid as a partner for the Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Provider Program. This initiative aims to support Drupal 7 users by carefully selecting providers that deliver extended security support services beyond the 5 January 2025 end-of-life (EOL) date.
The Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Provider Program allows organizations that cannot migrate from Drupal 7 to newer versions by the EOL date to continue using a version of Drupal 7 that is secure and compliant. This program complements the Association’s Drupal 7 Certified Migration Providers Program, which helps organizations find the right partner to transition their sites from Drupal 7 to Drupal 11.
Dropsolid’s Drupal 7 extended support offers Drupal 7 support beyond 5 January 2024, with Enterprise Drupal specialists with a reputation in the community, access to enterprise Drupal 7 developers to continue development, and much more.
“We’re excited that Dropsolid has stepped up and committed to our Drupal 7 Extended Security Support Program,” commented Tim Doyle, CEO of the Drupal Association. “Dropsolid has been a tremendous supporter of Drupal and the Drupal Community, and we’re grateful that they’re including bona fide Drupal 7 support among their offerings.”
As organizations prepare for the transition from Drupal 7, Dropsolid will provide the necessary support to keep their sites secure and operational.
Dominique De Cooman, co-founder and co-CEO of Dropsolid, proudly added: “We are thrilled to qualify for the Drupal 7 Extended Security Support program. Even more so since we're the only European company selected (even though we have offices in US and EU). As an organization of makers contributing towards security of Drupal and Mautic, we want to continue contributing to Drupal as much as possible. It's part of our mission to give Drupal 7 the End of Life it deserves. Beyond EOL support, Dropsolid will continue to deliver robust D7 support at both the code and platform levels. We’re here to back you—past, present, and future.”
More information on Drupal 7 Extended Support from Dropsolid.
The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization that fosters and supports the Drupal software project, the community, and its growth. Our mission is to drive innovation and adoption of Drupal as a high-impact digital public good, hand-in-hand with our open source community. Through various initiatives, events, and programs, the Drupal Association helps ensure the ongoing development and success of the Drupal project.
Driven by an open culture and with a passion for open source, Dropsolid shares their knowledge, code, and talent with their clients. Dropsolid designs, builds, hosts, evolves, and creates websites & DXP with results. Equipped with a CMS, marketing automation, personalization, and even AI. Starting from a strong digital strategy with one goal in mind: the best digital experiences for your organization and your customers and stakeholders.
When the value of the placeholder is the same as the value you need in the field, it just looks like a disabled field.
Drupal 11 was released recently. Yay. And with it comes a bunch of minor (and sometimes major) changes to the way Drupal works and the need to update the documentation to reflect those changes.
joe Wed, 08/28/2024 - 15:35
