UI Suite Monthly #27 - From Components to Core Integration

Overall Summary

Our May 2025 UI Suite community meeting brought together 20 passionate developers and contributors to discuss the exciting progress we're making toward transforming Drupal into the first design system native CMS. We celebrated significant milestones, including Pierre's promotion to provisional front-end framework manager, and showcased groundbreaking work on form API integration with Single Directory Components (SDC). The meeting highlighted our ambitious two-year roadmap and demonstrated how we're revolutionizing the way developers build and manage design systems in Drupal.

With major releases on the horizon and innovative features like component-driven form elements becoming reality, we're witnessing a pivotal moment in Drupal's evolution. Our community continues to grow, and the momentum behind our initiatives shows no signs of slowing down.

Key Topics Discussed

Pierre's Promotion and Vision for Drupal's Frontend Future We celebrated Pierre's well-deserved promotion to co-committer with the title of provisional front-end framework manager. His ambitious two-year plan aims to make Drupal the first design system native CMS by moving UI Suite definition formats to core, building upon the existing SDC and Icon API foundations. This represents a fundamental shift in how we approach frontend development in Drupal.

Revolutionary Form API Integration Florent presented remarkable progress on integrating components with Drupal's Form API. We can now mix form elements and components seamlessly, and we're developing the ability to define form elements directly as components. This breakthrough means front-end developers can create form elements using simple component declarations instead of complex 400-line PHP classes, dramatically simplifying the development process while enabling better design system integration.

UI Pattern 2.x Development Progress

• UI Patterns 2.0.4 is coming very soon with important bug fixes
• Version 2.1 is targeted for early June (scope may be adapted)
• Version 2.2 planning includes ambitious new features
• Component variant functionality has been successfully merged into Drupal 11.2
• We're working toward eliminating differences between SDC in core and UI Patterns

Icon API Moving to Core Our Icon API is ready to make the leap to Drupal core, targeting version 11.3. We've spent months refining the API and building community consensus. This move will provide a solid foundation for icon management across the entire Drupal ecosystem, representing years of collaborative effort coming to fruition.

Next-Generation Display Builder Development We're developing a revolutionary display builder that leverages our comprehensive design system toolkit. Unlike converting everything to Drupal plugins, our approach uses a single module that natively loads and manages design system APIs. The builder unifies the building experience and introduces powerful new features, with a public release expected by the end of May 2025.

Design System Theme Packages Our theme packages continue to expand, showcasing real-world implementations of various design systems:

• UI Suite DSFR (French government design system) is approaching RC1 with only one minor feature remaining
• UI Suite DaisyUI 5 alpha 2 was released with a major starter kit feature developed by Christian
• European Commission design system implementation is being considered
• We're exploring implementations for Material Design, Adobe Spectrum, IBM Carbon, and other modern design systems

Key Action Points

Immediate Development Priorities We need to focus on finalizing the Form API integration work and preparing the Icon API for core inclusion in Drupal 11.3. The display builder team is working intensively on code restructuring and plugin reorganization to ensure a stable public release. These technical foundations are crucial for our long-term vision of design system native Drupal.

Web Components Strategy Development The growing adoption of web components in modern design systems requires us to develop a comprehensive strategy. We're seeing systems like Material Design, Adobe Spectrum, and IBM Carbon heavily utilizing web components as their reference implementations. We need to create toolsets and helpers that enable front-end developers to generate components from web components and integrate them seamlessly with our existing architecture.

Community Engagement and Education Our North American community members, particularly Zen, are actively promoting UI Suite at user groups and camps across the continent. We should support these efforts by sharing presentation materials and coordinating our messaging. The upcoming DrupalCon Vienna in October 2025 will be a crucial opportunity to showcase our progress, with four proposed talks covering various aspects of our work.

Core Integration Roadmap We must continue our systematic approach to moving UI Suite features into Drupal core. With component variants already merged for Drupal 11.2 and shell references in progress, we're building momentum toward our goal of making design system functionality native to Drupal. Each successful integration validates our approach and brings us closer to our vision.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

Our UI Suite community continues to grow and innovate, with 20 participants in this month's meeting demonstrating the strong engagement around our initiatives. Join us on Slack or attend our monthly meetings to be part of Drupal's frontend revolution.