UI Suite Monthly #12 - One Year Strong and Ready for UI Patterns 2.0

Overall Summary

What a milestone! We've officially completed one full year of our monthly UI Suite meetings, marking an incredible journey that began at DrupalCon Prague with our first UI Patterns release. This October meeting was particularly special as we celebrated our anniversary while diving deep into the exciting developments around UI Patterns 2.0.

Our team has grown significantly over the past year, now boasting a solid development team of six dedicated contributors. We've made substantial progress on multiple fronts, from consolidating our ecosystem to introducing new plugin types and tools that will revolutionize how we work with design systems in Drupal. The meeting highlighted our commitment to simplifying the developer experience while maintaining the powerful flexibility that makes UI Patterns so valuable.

The discussion covered everything from our core development priorities to community growth, with particular emphasis on preparing for the next major version of UI Pattern. We're not just building incremental improvements – we're architecting a more cohesive, powerful, and user-friendly ecosystem that addresses the feedback we've received over the past year.

Key Topics Discussed

UI Patterns 2.0 Development Progress

The development of UI Patterns 2.0 has reached a crucial phase with our specification document now in a solid state after extensive testing and refinement. Our collaboration with Christian and the K-Tech team in Munich proved invaluable, combining productive work sessions with thorough specification testing. This comprehensive approach ensures that every aspect of the new architecture has been validated before implementation begins.

Key architectural changes include:

• Introduction of a new prop type plugin system
• Enhanced source plugin capabilities supporting both props and slots
• Improved data retrieval mechanisms that allow slots to fetch their own data
• Integration of form widget capabilities directly into the slot system

Ecosystem Consolidation Strategy

One of our primary goals for UI Patterns 2.0 is addressing the complexity feedback we consistently receive from the community. Currently, implementing a complete UI Pattern solution can require activating 5-10 different modules, which creates a steep learning curve for newcomers.

Our consolidation approach involves merging several ecosystem modules directly into the core UI Patterns package while strategically moving others (like Display Suite integration and Field Group support) into the broader ecosystem. This restructuring will provide users with a more complete out-of-the-box experience while maintaining modularity for advanced use cases.

Technical Improvements and New Features

The UI Patterns Settings module has seen significant development with new link types and machine name types nearing completion. These enhancements will enable us to migrate menu structures, breadcrumb structures, and pager structures from fields to proper settings, creating a cleaner separation of concerns.

We're also making substantial progress on style widgets, moving beyond basic select elements to provide more intuitive form interfaces. The new system includes dedicated widgets for lists, booleans, ranges, and colors, with intelligent type detection for missing configurations.

Community Growth and Adoption

Our community continues to expand, with our Slack channel showing steady growth and engagement. The recent DrupalCon provided excellent networking opportunities and reinforced the strong interest in our initiative. We were particularly excited to learn about widespread adoption within the French government, where UI Patterns implementations far exceed the numbers visible on Drupal.org due to firewall restrictions preventing usage reporting.

Key Action Points

Immediate Development Priorities

Our next critical step involves organizing a kickoff meeting for the UI Patterns 2.0 development phase. This session will bring together our core team of six developers to assign specific issues, establish sprint schedules, and coordinate our collaborative workflow. Team members are expected to review the specification document and examine the 2.0.x prototype branch before this crucial planning session.

For UI Patterns 1.x maintenance, we're implementing a focused strategy that prioritizes bug fixes and compatibility improvements with UI Patterns 2.0. New features and non-essential changes will be directed toward the 2.0 development track to avoid duplicate work across branches.

Technical Migration Tasks

Theme developers need to begin preparing for the transition by removing preprocess functions from their patterns, as these won't be compatible with the new SDC-based architecture. We're also working to ensure all fields are properly configured as slots and all settings are defined as props, creating consistency across the entire pattern ecosystem.

The Twig team has responded to our feature request for collection handling, requiring us to provide detailed technical responses to move this important capability forward. This enhancement is crucial for properly handling multiple renderable items within single slots.

Community and Integration Work

We're actively seeking contributors for several key integration projects, including layout option consolidation and enhanced block support. The layout option integration is particularly promising as it could eliminate redundancy between our component system and existing layout tools, since both share similar template-based approaches with regions/slots and options/props.

Display Suite compatibility remains a priority, with ongoing work to ensure seamless integration between our pattern system and existing site building tools. We're also exploring opportunities to simplify the module ecosystem while providing more comprehensive functionality.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

Our roadmap shows an ambitious but achievable set of goals for the coming months. The next few weeks will be particularly crucial as we transition from planning to active development on UI Pattern 2.0, while maintaining our commitment to supporting the current ecosystem and community needs.