UI Suite Monthly #11 - Exciting Progress on UI Patterns 2.0 and New Icons Module

Overall Summary

Our September UI Suite initiative meeting marked a pivotal moment as we officially launched development on UI Patterns 2.0, building on the solid foundation of Single Directory Components (SDC) now available in Drupal core. The meeting covered significant progress across our entire ecosystem, from UI Styles reaching new milestones to exciting developments in our component library approach.

We're transitioning from targeting Drupal 10.2 to prepare for UI Patterns 2.0's ambitious timeline, with plans for a first beta by December. Our team has been busy with library improvements, synchronizing toolbar links across modules, and adding crucial documentation links to plugin definitions. The most exciting development is our comprehensive approach to extending SDC with the missing features that make UI Patterns 1 so powerful, while maintaining full backward compatibility.

Key Topics Discussed

UI Patterns 1.0 Updates and Ongoing Development

• We continue targeting Drupal 10.2 for our current projects browser implementation
• Two significant library improvements were synchronized across all modules, including moving toolbar links from logs to appearance settings
• Links to upstream documentation, licenses, and external articles can now be added to plugin definitions, making our documentation ecosystem more robust

UI Patterns 2.0 - The Major Initiative Launch The centerpiece of our discussion was the official launch of UI Patterns2.0 development. We're extending SDC (Single Directory Components) to create a more powerful foundation that maintains compatibility with Drupal's extensive API ecosystem. Our three-phase approach starts with specification development in September, followed by public issue creation and development, leading to workshops in late October and our ambitious December beta target.

The new architecture will eliminate preprocessing entirely, as SDC was specifically designed to make preprocessing impossible. This represents a fundamental shift in how we approach component development. We're ensuring compatibility with view modes, layout builders, views, field groups, and the entire Drupal API ecosystem that makes UI Pattern 1 so versatile.

UI Styles 1.6 Release and New Features Our UI Styles module reached version 1.6 with significant enhancements. The demo showcased new capabilities for applying styles to block layouts, page-level settings, and layered regions. We can now use styles across layout builder blocks, regions, SEC editor, paragraphs, pages, and block layouts - essentially covering all Drupal APIs as intended.

Icons Module Proposal - Addressing a Critical Gap We identified icons as the missing piece in our component ecosystem. According to Material Design team surveys, 84% of design systems include icon libraries, making this our most critical missing artifact. Our proposed solution involves managing icons as first-class objects through a centralized repository, supporting multiple icon sets, and providing both manual curation and automatic discovery mechanisms.

Key Action Points

Immediate Development Priorities 

• Complete UI Patterns 2.0 specification document and transition from private draft to public development
• Remove remaining preprocessing from our theme implementations (Bootstrap, Material, Protocol, SF themes)
• Investigate and potentially collaborate with the existing Icons module that shows promising compatibility with our architecture

Preparation for UI Patterns 2.0 Migration Teams should begin preparing for the transition by examining their current implementations. Fields should contain only renderable arrays or plain text to ensure SDC slot compatibility, while settings should avoid render arrays to work properly with SDC props. Anyone using internal APIs like plugin managers should be aware these will be replaced by SDC's query manager system.

Community Engagement and Collaboration We're reaching out to teams already experimenting with UI Patterns 2.0 concepts to ensure proper coordination and avoid fragmentation. Our specification will remain private initially to prevent premature adoption of draft concepts, but we welcome anyone interested in accessing the working document.

Upcoming Events and Releases Several team members will attend DrupalCon Europe, providing opportunities for in-person collaboration and community feedback. We're planning workshops in late October to gather broader community input on our UI Patterns 2.0 direction.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

Our ambitious timeline reflects the community's eagerness for UI Pattern 2.0, though we remain flexible to ensure we deliver quality over speed. The December beta target represents a significant milestone that will demonstrate the viability of our SDC-based approach while providing a clear upgrade path for existing implementations.