A Look at the Ongoing Efforts to Revitalize Drupal’s Front End
Many great front end experiences have been built with Drupal and undoubtably many more will be created in the future. Yet it is impossible to deny the feeling that Drupal’s Twig theme engine hasn’t been able to keep up with expectations for modern front end developer experience.
Luckily, the Drupal community is hard at work trying to change this. In true Drupal style, there are simultaneous efforts tackling this from different and sometimes conflicting angles.
- Home renovations - improving Twig-based theming and making components a core primitive in Drupal.
- If you (page) build it… - meeting the expectations of ambitious site builders with Experience Builder and other existing page building solutions.
- A better life through decoupling - making headless Drupal use cases easier and embracing JavaScript front ends.
- Let’s Go Crazy - experiments with alternative rendering engines, Node, and Web Assembly.
We’ll dig into what’s really going on out there in the Drupal front end community. With any luck, we’ll also reach a few conclusions about how Drupal’s front end can live beyond (or possibly in harmony with) the JavaScript framework flavor of the week.
The Drupal API Client Project
Funded as part of the Pitchburg Innovation Contest, The Drupal API Client project aims to assemble a group of contributors in order to combine the best of existing Drupal API clients into a set of utilities that can both address common use cases with little configuration, and also be extended to support the needs of a diverse JavaScript ecosystem.
At New England Drupal Camp, we'd like to introduce you to the project, including:
- Why we believe that this is an important problem to solve for the Drupal community.
- A tour of past projects that helped pave the way for our work.
- An overview of the initial scope of the project.
- A look at our progress thus far.
- Areas where we need feedback.
- Details on how you can contribute.