Back in 2007, the very first iPhone was released, skeuomorphic design golden era was starting, the last Harry Potter book was published, and Britney Spears had an extra tough year. Also, Drupal 5 shipped with the jQuery JavaScript library.
Over ten years later, while Drupal's JavaScript has seen some great advancement since those days—for example, adopting AirBnB standards, and introducing a JavaScript build process, and upgrading to the most recent versions of jQuery and jQuery UI in 8.5—there still remains a lot of legacy JavaScript code in core from "back in the day" that makes it suboptimal to maintain.
This session will provide an update, and discussion around the following topics we are currently working on. We are especially looking for feedback on everything we are currently working on!
- Developing and finalizing plans for modernization efforts,
- Allowing forms to be defined in three segments, Schema, UI, Data. Essential to any form rendering to the client side.
- What capabilities should be present in a new JavaScript based UI
- Creating a component library for Drupal-specific UI patterns.
- Create a JavaScript-based automated test suite for JavaScript
- Leverage Nightwatch for browser functional testing
- Replace PhantomJS with WebDriver
- Prepare Drupal to better support modern, JavaScript-rich user-interfaces
- Design the new UI
- User research gathering feedback with surveys or Card Sorting sessions.
- Design System creation with components and design patterns
- Seven restyling with the new design system to have an according UI until all the administration has transitioned to React.
