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Laying the foundation for a (code-free) site building experience in Drupal 8

Speaker(s): 

The architectural improvements that are being made to Drupal 8 including Symfony, Twig, Blocks and Layouts, etc. provide fantastic opportunities for improving site building in Drupal. As we dive into creating the plumbing necessary to make these things happen, now is the time to determine how all of the functionality that this code enables should be organized and presented to the user in a way that accelerates and enriches the site building experience.

We’ll start with a quick overview of the site building experience provided by D7 core. Using test data we will follow a new user from installation through site building to content creation, identifying at each point the major obstacles to user success we have uncovered.

The second section will cover approaches to improving the site building experience that have come out of contrib including panels, context, display suite and others. Using screenshots of key UIs we’ll show how they attempt to address some of the problems we identified and spotlight a few of the best usability innovations introduced by each of them.

The third section will present the working modules (breakpoints, breakpoint UI, gridbuilder, regions, layout, blocks, ember, etc.), prototypes (unified block and layout UI) and designs (fields UI, styles UI), that center around site building. Building on the insights outlined in the first two sections we will show in a live demo site how these UIs can be pulled together into a seamless site building workspace.

The session will end with an invitation to comment on the designs, question time and an invitation to join sprints to complete the remaining work.