UI Suite Monthly #29 - Paving the Path to Design System Native Drupal

Our latest UI Suite Initiative monthly meeting showcased significant momentum toward making Drupal truly design system native. With major developments in our core integration efforts, exciting new features in Display Builder, and strategic planning for upcoming releases, we're closer than ever to delivering a comprehensive design system foundation for the Drupal ecosystem.

Overall Summary

We're at a pivotal moment in our journey toward integrating UI Suite's most important components directly into Drupal core. Our community continues to grow with new branding, successful talks, and expanding usage - we've hit the 700 usage mark with minimal bugs, which demonstrates the stability of our ecosystem. The meeting highlighted our dual focus: moving core functionality upstream to Drupal while simultaneously advancing our display building capabilities and preparing for feature-complete releases.

The session covered major updates across all our key modules - from UI Icons' successful integration with Drupal core's new icon API to Display Builder's impressive alpha 3 features including configurable islands and real-time collaboration capabilities. We also discussed our strategic shift toward smaller, more frequent releases and addressed important UX improvements based on community feedback.

Key Topics Discussed

Core Integration Progress Our most significant focus remains on five critical issues that will establish Drupal as design system native. We're proposing a comprehensive Style API to manage style utilities, class utilities, helpers, and theme/mode switching functionality directly in core. Additionally, we're working on a Design Tokens API that will handle CSS variables using the W3C standard format, allowing designers to define tokens that generate CSS variables at runtime.

The remaining three core issues focus on allowing SDC to define form elements, enabling Drupal core to resolve schema references, and adding form elements for icons. If we succeed in delivering these five issues with Drupal 11.3, we'll have all the foundational low-level APIs needed for a truly design system native CMS.

Display Builder Alpha 3 Achievements Our Display Builder has reached impressive new capabilities with configurable islands that can be enabled or disabled based on user profiles and permissions. This flexible approach allows us to create different interfaces for reviewers, contributors, and power users. We've introduced comprehensive testing including end-to-end JavaScript testing, which is crucial given our heavy reliance on JavaScript functionality.

The new page layout feature represents a significant advancement, allowing users to build full page layouts directly within Display Builder while maintaining fallback support for existing block layout functionality. This addresses many limitations of current Drupal layout management tools by providing preview-based building, multiple page support, and context-sensitive block integration.

Module Updates and Ecosystem Growth UI Icons continues to gain traction with Experience Builder Design now using the core icon API, demonstrating real-world adoption of our standards. We're preparing to extract the form element from UI Icons directly into core, which requires cleaning up the existing implementation and ensuring proper test coverage.

Our themes ecosystem shows strong progress with UI Suite Bootstrap 5 nearing stable release after years of development. We're also updating our versioning strategy to align with upstream numbering conventions, so our next DSFR version will be 1.14 instead of 1.2.

Key Action Points

Immediate Core Development Priorities We need community members to take ownership of the remaining core issues, particularly the schema references functionality for SDC components. This feature will benefit not just our ecosystem but also Experience Builder and anyone using SDC with Drupal. We're offering mentorship for developers interested in tackling these critical issues, as they represent some of the most important mechanisms missing from Drupal's current architecture.

The CSS variables and design tokens work requires collaboration with existing prototype efforts. We're coordinating with the SDC creator who has developed a design tokens prototype, ensuring our approach aligns with established standards while meeting our specific runtime requirements.

Display Builder Development Focus Our immediate priority involves fixing the Ajax integration issues between Drupal's Ajax API and HTMX to ensure smooth functionality across all Display Builder features. Once resolved, we expect rapid progress toward our feature-complete alpha 4 release.

We're actively seeking community feedback on UX improvements, particularly around our component forms. While we acknowledge current complexity issues, our architecture provides the flexibility needed to implement suggested improvements. These enhancements will benefit not only Display Builder users but also anyone working with our side panel interface.

Community Engagement and Testing We're calling for increased community involvement in testing our alpha releases, especially as we approach beta stability. The upcoming alpha 4 will include real-time collaboration features and content display overrides, making it our most comprehensive release yet. We need adventurous users willing to experiment with Display Builder in actual projects, particularly after our beta 1 release when we'll have full test coverage.

Our module maintainers (UI Styles, UI Skins, UI Examples) welcome community contributions, especially as we focus heavily on core integration work. These modules will continue to be valuable for functionality that doesn't move to core, so there's still significant opportunity for community-driven improvements.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

Join us at DrupalCon to see these developments in action! We'll have validated presentations and will be releasing major updates during the conference. Stay connected through our community channels for the latest updates and opportunities to contribute to this exciting evolution of Drupal's design system capabilities.