UI Suite Monthly #19 - Major Milestones and Revolutionary Nesting Capabilities

Overall Summary

Our nineteenth monthly meeting showcased remarkable progress across the UI Suite ecosystem. We're experiencing a pivotal moment in our four-year journey as we transition from individual modules to a comprehensive meta-package solution. The star of this month's updates was UI Patterns 2, which has achieved 100% feature completion with Alpha 3 and introduced game-changing component nesting capabilities that eliminate many traditional Drupal limitations.

We celebrated significant adoption milestones, including UI Patterns 1 reaching over 5000 installations and being present on 1.5% of all Drupal 9 and 10 websites. Our team demonstrated the powerful new nesting functionality that allows unlimited component composition, revolutionizing how developers approach display building in Drupal. Additionally, we made substantial progress on UI Styles with enhanced selection widgets, advanced our UI Icon module toward core inclusion consideration, and strengthened our compatibility efforts across Drupal 10.3 and 11.

Key Topics Discussed

UI Suite Evolution and Meta-Package Strategy Our strategic shift from individual modules to a unified meta-package represents a fundamental change in how we deliver the UI Suite experience. We're introducing a composer package that will install all five core modules with a simple composer require drupal/ui-suite command, making adoption significantly easier for new users.

• UI Patterns 2 Achievement: We've reached 100% feature completion with Alpha 3, covering all consumer plugins from core and implementing comprehensive testing with Drupal's native tools
• Revolutionary Nesting Capabilities: The new component nesting system eliminates traditional Drupal limitations, allowing developers to nest components infinitely without fighting view mode restrictions or manage display constraints
• Source Plugin System: Our flexible source mechanism enables components to pull data from any field, field formatter, or contextual source, providing unprecedented flexibility in component composition

UI Styles Widget Enhancement Revolution After two years of development, we're finally delivering the highly requested visual selection improvements for UI Styles. This addresses one of the most common complaints about the module's select-list-only interface.

Our new plugin system introduces multiple selection methods including icon toolbars, checkbox interfaces, and radio button previews with CSS-based visual feedback. The system intelligently chooses the best widget based on available options and automatically provides previews where relevant. We've designed this enhancement to work out-of-the-box without requiring additional JavaScript dependencies, making it a seamless upgrade for existing implementations.

UI Icons Module's Core Inclusion Journey We're embarking on an ambitious timeline to potentially include UI Icons in Drupal core 11.1 through the fast-track process. Our development approach involves rapid private iteration for the next 10 days, followed by 50 days of public development on drupal.org.

• Strategic Timeline: Specification becomes public July 29th, with mid-September release targeting core inclusion consideration
• Comprehensive Icon System: The module will provide full icon management capabilities for experience builders and navigation modules
• Community Collaboration: We're working closely with existing icon module maintainers to ensure compatibility and shared learnings

Public Implementation Showcases Our three distinct theming approaches continue to demonstrate the versatility of our ecosystem. The Legacy theming uses traditional Drupal theming with template suggestions, the SDC theming implements pure component-based approaches with presenter templates, and our UI Suite theming achieves full design system methodology with minimal custom templating.

The French government system (DSFR) has reached its first stable version 1.0, covering the complete upstream 1.10 scope and serving as a powerful example of government design system implementation. We're also making significant progress on USWDS compatibility and preparing for the Barcelona DrupalCon showcase.

Key Action Points

Development and Release Priorities Our immediate focus centers on solidifying UI Patterns 2 for its beta 1 release in 10 days, which will be our first publicly recommended testing version. We're concentrating on code quality improvements, performance optimization, and comprehensive bug fixes to ensure a solid foundation.

The roadmap through September involves beta 2 focusing on unit test coverage and UX improvements, followed by beta 3 addressing configuration migration from UI Pattern 1. We're committed to making the upgrade path as smooth as possible for existing users while maintaining backward compatibility where feasible.

Community Engagement and Testing We're actively seeking testing partners for UI Patterns 2 to ensure compatibility across diverse use cases. Teams interested in early adoption can contact Pierre directly for confidential testing arrangements and compatibility assessments. This collaborative approach helps us identify edge cases and improve our documentation before wider release.

Drupal 11 Compatibility Initiative Our compatibility work is progressing well, with fixes already implemented during Drupal Dev Days. We're systematically updating all modules to support Drupal 11 while maintaining compatibility with current versions. The UI Styles CKEditor 5 integration has been particularly challenging, requiring careful version management to support multiple Drupal releases.

Barcelona DrupalCon Preparation We're preparing multiple sessions for Barcelona, including a comprehensive UI Patterns 2 demonstration during the release candidate phase and a live implementation showcase of government design systems. These presentations will highlight our mature ecosystem and demonstrate real-world applications to the broader Drupal community.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases