UI Suite Monthly #13 - Ecosystem Evolution and UI Patterns Consolidation

Overall Summary

Our November 2023 monthly meeting showcased significant momentum in UI Patterns 2 development while addressing key architectural challenges in our ecosystem. We're making substantial progress on the core project that will be merged in version 103, with the same dedicated six-person team continuing to drive development forward through weekly Thursday meetings.

The meeting highlighted our strategic focus on ecosystem consolidation - a key goal that will allow us to address everything from formal core without extra modules and reduce the current seven extra modules to just two. This addresses one of the most common complaints about our ecosystem being "too messy" for newcomers, demonstrating our commitment to simplifying the developer experience without compromising functionality.

We also discussed several proposals for component filtering and visibility controls, ecosystem updates including new releases from design systems like DSFR, and the ongoing evolution of our community initiatives. The conversation revealed both technical achievements and philosophical questions about the future direction of our ecosystem architecture.

Key Topics Discussed

UI Patterns 2 Core Development Progress Our development team has made significant strides in several key areas, with the plugin manager and schema manager showing the most advancement due to their already-advanced prototype state. Layout building plugins and form builder components have also seen meaningful progress this month.

• Views and formatter components are experiencing expected delays due to their complex APIs, which were already challenging in the existing core implementation
• The formatter system we currently have is particularly ambitious, covering multiple data sources, making slower progress understandable
• We haven't made significant progress on extending SDC, but this remains a priority for future development cycles

Component Visibility and Filtering Proposals A new proposal from Stefan introduces a component definition property to hide patterns from Site Builder interfaces while maintaining full developer functionality. This proposal is orthogonal to existing filtering mechanisms and addresses a different scope than other similar proposals.

The discussion raised important questions about whether filtering should be purely technical (based on prop types, component relationships) versus business-oriented (role-based permissions). Our team emphasized the importance of keeping filtering rules technical rather than introducing complex business permission layers that could create confusing user experiences.

Ecosystem Updates and New Implementations We celebrated the release of DSFR beta 5, our French government design system implementation, which demonstrates the collaborative strength of our ecosystem with contributions from multiple team members including ourselves, Smile, and others.

• Page Designer 3.1 was released, showing increased integration with UI Pattern through definition and low-level APIs
• UI Patterns Pattern Lab received new commits after months of inactivity, suggesting renewed development interest
• New ecosystem implementations are emerging, including USWDS (US government design system) and potential Material Design 3 branches

Key Action Points

Immediate Development Priorities We need to address the SDC sensibility issue that's been creating tickets without significant traction. While someone else has created a similar ticket that's gaining momentum, we should determine whether to merge efforts or maintain both approaches, as they address slightly different aspects of the discovery method problem.

UI Patterns 2 Migration Preparation Theme developers and back-end developers must prepare for UI Patterns 2 by eliminating variant-specific templates. If projects currently use templates specifically for variants (like card-horizontal.html.twig), these need to be merged into the main component template. We're making this change because SDC doesn't support multiple templates per component, requiring us to adapt our approach for better upstream compatibility.

Community Tool Development We're developing a component twig validator tool for internal use that will be published to drupal.org by January. This validator will test all the good practices we promote and enforce with UI Patterns and SDC, checking for business logic in templates, unexpected dependencies, improper application state calls, and poor slot/prop separation.

Settings and Architecture Evolution New setting types including machine names and improved link handling are now available, with machine names being particularly useful for stricter validation than basic text fields. We're also shipping updates to link settings that maintain backward compatibility while adding missing features.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

The meeting concluded with discussions about accommodating US-based contributors by potentially moving meeting times and exploring whether to skip the December meeting due to holidays. Our community continues to grow with seven new members this month, demonstrating the expanding interest and engagement in our ecosystem initiatives.