UI Suite Monthly #35 — Translations Land, Core Proposals Heat Up, and AI Enters the Arena

Overall Summary

Our 35th UI Suite Monthly was one of the most packed sessions yet — a full hour of demos, strategy updates, and an urgent call to action for the community. We covered major progress on the Display Builder (now mid-beta with half its scope completed), a breakthrough demo of symmetric and asymmetric translation support, a roadmap for cleaning up and refocusing UI Patterns this summer, the exciting new ability to use SDC components as form elements, and two critical core proposals — the Design Token API and the Style API — that need community support before the May 15th freeze. We also gave a first look at our AI strategy for display building, with a live demo coming next month. In short: our ecosystem is maturing fast, and the next week is decisive.

Key Topics Discussed

• Display Builder reaches mid-beta. We have been releasing beta updates on a monthly to bimonthly cadence since January, and we have now completed half of the project's scope. All foundational layers are done: integration with Drupal's display and pair storage, business logic, state manipulation, and the full UI feature set including profiles and plugins. Our current efforts focus on the upper layers — symmetry, translation, UI refinement, and accessibility — alongside a steady stream of smaller bug fixes. Beta 5 will introduce a breaking change to the instance entity storage (nothing valuable is lost), so anyone already using the Display Builder in a project should publish their drafts before upgrading and then run a simple Drush command to clean up.
• Symmetric and asymmetric translations. Christian Wiedemann demonstrated a major milestone: translation support that covers both configuration and content, fully integrated with the Drupal Translation API. The implementation introduces a new checkbox at the field level that lets users choose synchronized (symmetric) translation or independent (asymmetric) translation. In symmetric mode, structural changes like adding a new component propagate across all languages, while text changes like updating a label remain language-specific. Configuration translation is always synchronized by design. Under the hood, UI Patterns stores translations as a flat list while maintaining a single tree for multiple languages, and Display Builder rebuilds the tree at publish time using dedicated plugins for each integration (display, entity view, etc.). The work was more complex than anticipated, but the result is pragmatic and fast — a significant achievement compared to similar efforts on other visual builders.
• UI Patterns schema migration and codebase refocus. We need to adopt the new unified namespace from Drupal core, moving away from the UI Patterns-prefixed namespace. A demo of the conversion process is planned for next week. Meanwhile, we are experiencing a wave of new users on both UI Patterns 1 and 2, and our migration tooling — the "UI Patterns Legacy" module and its Drush command — is making the upgrade from version 1 to 2 smooth and fast for real-world projects. This summer, we are committing to giving UI Patterns "a lot of love": we aim to reduce the codebase from 8,600 lines to approximately 6,000 lines through three targeted cleanup tasks (internally codenamed "UI Patterns Next"), while continuing to add powerful features and improving issue queue responsiveness.
• Canvas compatibility. Canvas and UI Patterns are currently incompatible, requiring work from both sides. Our top priority is fixing the SDC plugin manager interaction so that both systems can override it cooperatively. The second priority is for Canvas to adopt the same Drupal core schema migration that we are undertaking now.
• SDC components as form elements. Florent Torregrosa demonstrated a new capability introduced in Drupal 11.3: SDC components can now serve as Form API elements. This means that form-related components — text fields, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more — can be declared as components within design systems and used directly in Form API. This opens the door to a new UI Patterns submodule called "UI Patterns Field Widgets," which allows components to be used in entity form displays via "Manage Form Display" configuration, just as UI Patterns Field Formatters already work for view modes. The demo showed a standard title text field replaced by a Bootstrap component form control, with full prop and slot mapping. Currently, only basic properties (value loading, submission, required) are handled, but follow-up core issues will expand coverage. This is expected to become one of the biggest changes of the Drupal 12 lifecycle, progressively moving form API under the control of design systems rather than the application layer.
• Design Token API and Style API proposals for core. We presented two proposals targeting Drupal 11.4 and Drupal 12. The Design Token API introduces a platform-agnostic way to declare design tokens in themes, with a new plugin manager that parses token declarations and converts them into config entities — adding the web-specific notion of scope (CSS selectors) that platform-agnostic tokens lack. The Style API provides granular, trackable application of CSS styles through a new plugin system, a standard form element for style selection, and a new addStyle method on the attributes object that replaces separate class and library attachment calls. Both proposals are in review and need community help to reach RTBC status before the freeze.
• AI strategy for display building. We are exploring two strategies for generating displays from prompts. The first is a "robot strategy" using Playwright MCP, where the AI acts like a human administrator browsing and interacting with the Display Builder UI. The second — and potentially more elegant — approach connects the AI directly to our API, which relies on only seven public methods to build any display across any design system and Drupal integration. Rajab Natshah from Vardot will present a demo based on the robot strategy at next month's meeting.

Key Action Points

• Review core issues before May 15th. This is our most urgent ask. We have four issues in review for Drupal 11.4 and Drupal 12 (Design Token API, Style API, and related proposals), and we need the community to help move them to RTBC before the freeze date. Pierre will share direct links in the Slack channels. Even one or two reviewers from our meeting attendees could make the difference.
• Publish your drafts before upgrading to beta 5. The upcoming beta 5 release will include a breaking change to the instance entity storage. If you are currently using Display Builder in a project, save and publish all drafts before pulling the update. After migrating, a simple drush command will clean up any orphaned draft data. No valuable content will be lost if you follow this process.
• Demo the Drupal core schema migration. Next week, we will demonstrate how to convert a theme from the current UI Patterns-prefixed namespace to the new unified Drupal core namespace. This is a required step for the ecosystem, and Canvas will need to follow suit.
• Refocus on UI Patterns this summer. Our priority shifts to reducing the codebase, processing the issue queue more effectively, and continuing to support new use cases. The "UI Patterns Next" cleanup effort targets three specific tasks to bring the codebase down to around 6,000 lines.
• Prepare the AI demo for next month. Rajab Natshah will present a demonstration based on the robot (Playwright) strategy for AI-driven display building at the June monthly.
• Submit conference talks. We are planning to attend DrupalCon Rotterdam, Drupal Camp Bologna (October), and Drupal Camp Madrid (November). Talk proposals should be submitted for Bologna and Madrid.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

Want to get involved? Join our Slack channel, help review the core issues, or attend our next monthly on June 11th. Every contribution counts — especially this week.