Three weeks ago, from 26 to 28 June took place the Drupal Dev Days 2024 in Burgas, Bulgaria.
The event welcomed 161 participants, which is less than half of the previous edition, this can certainly be explained by the city of Burgas must not have been easy to access airlines-wise.
Here is a summary of the sessions I attended. I mainly sprinted on the UI Suite ecosystem and took part in discussions.
Shaping Tomorrow: Drupal's Blueprint for Innovation
Presentation on how to convince people that Drupal is a very good product. Presentation of the community's efforts and the benefits of drupal.org:
- collaboration
- open source
- security team
- packaging system, CI, Gitlab
A point on the fact that the more companies there are specialising in Drupal, the more credibility it gives it and therefore it gives your own company credibility when you offer Drupal.
Drupal Starshot
The aim of Drupal Starshot is to save time on Drupal projects by offering to compose your Drupal via the new recipe-based configuration management system.
In addition, the solution will embed:
- Automatic updates: renamed to Drupal Package UI
- Project browser
- Experience builder when ready
There was a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages between installation profiles and recipes. Judging by the reactions of the audience, installation profiles are no longer in vogue at all.
And I didn't get to ask my question about the future of installation profiles at the end of the presentation. I don't know why the organisers were so limiting on the number of questions.
Navigation changes in Drupal's Admin UI
Presentation of the new core module, Navigation, providing a side admin bar, a bit like the one offered by Gin Toolbar, but based on a Layout Builder system to be manageable.
This was not the Gin toolbar that was chosen because studies have indicated that it poses accessibility problems and that redesigning it was not in the Gin Toolbar roadmap.
I was able to ask my questions at the end of the presentation:
- Are there any plans to make the same secondary toolbar system as Gin proposes? No
- Is an out-of-the-box integration planned with the Devel module (in my opinion almost the only thing missing from this new toolbar): not yet, but it's under consideration.
So by the time I'd asked my questions, I'd missed the group photo...
With the new Navigation module, I'll be able to remove the Admin Toolbar module from my projects. As well as potentially Gin.
UI Patterns 2: Unleash SDC power, plug your components directly into Drupal UI
As I follow the UI Patterns 2 topic fairly closely, I knew the presentation in advance. I went anyway in support, and also to show that there were several people from the UI Suite community at the event.
Very good demo of the power of UI Patterns 2, which fills in the gaps of UI patterns 1 and builds on the experience gained in recent years with UI Patterns 1 to push the capabilities of components in Drupal.
Index me baby!
Very good explanation of how search works in general and how it applies in Drupal.
I finally understood N-Gram and Edge-N-gram.
Discussions
With Pierre Dureau, we were able to have 2 long discussions with Cristina Chumillas related to the new Experience Builder.
The first was about icon management in the kernel and/or in Experience Builder, we presented to her the architecture of the future UI Icons module that we want to integrate into UI Suite, the aim being to pool efforts with why not a possible inclusion of UI Icons or part of UI Icons in the kernel to serve as a basic API that could then be extended into contrib. In the same way that UI Patterns 2 extends SDC.
The second discussion was about design tokens and their implementation/use in Experience Builder. I only discovered design tokens 2 months earlier via discussions with Pierre, so I was more of a spectator to this discussion.
Sprint
Before the event itself, I took advantage of downtime during my trip to Burgas to make almost all my modules compatible with Drupal 11.
And with a replay on deprecated code with the release of Drupal 10.3 the week before Drupal Dev Days, which resulted in new deprecations being detected. On some of my modules, I opened new branches with version 10.3 as the minimum kernel version to be able to deal with the deprecations immediately.
In the Entity Access Password module, I wanted to take advantage of a new 10.3 feature, which allowed me to find a bug, or rather the lack of support for a new feature, in the Coder module, which I was able to deal with during the DDDs. I also took the opportunity to update my PHP Code Sniffer rules library.
During the DDDs, I was able to finish or make progress on the following UI Suite-related topics:
- Making ecosystem modules compatible with Drupal 11
- Activate Gitlab CI on UI Patterns 2
- Fix a UI Styles bug
- Finalise the introduction of a theme dependency mechanic in UI Skins
- Demonstrate through error testing a problem managing theme inheritance with plugins declared in YAML in the core and therefore affecting the entire UI Suite ecosystem
Conclusion
A fairly productive event in terms of contributions, with progress on UI Suite and above all discussions to grow UI Suite's influence on the core and 2024's flagship topics Starshot and Experience Builder.
Thanks to the organisers, sponsors, participants and Smile for sending me there.
Photos: https://www.flickr.com/groups/ddd24/pool/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLza5NTXQjgP-E9AtCOvFMVT4ir-vKWR-z