Michael Meyers

Last month at DrupalCon Global, Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, announced that a major focus of Drupal 9 will be improving the user interface and user experience of the platform - for all personas. Two of the five D9 Strategic Initiatives have been dedicated to making this happen. The “New Front-End Theme Initiative” or user interface (UI) for Drupal, also known as the Olivero Theme, covers the end-user experience. The “Admin UI & JavaScript...

Preston So

Part 1 | Part 2 Emerging approaches to front-end development portend a very different world from the one we live in today with regard to handling and juggling components. After all, new best practices promulgated by the likes of JavaScript technologies like React are overturning our preconceived notions about components and our foregoing definitions. For instance, React now contains both declarative rendering of components through JSX and efficient document object model (DOM) diffing...

Preston So

Part 1 | Part 2 Front-end development workflows have seen considerable innovation in recent years, with technologies like React disseminating revolutionary concepts like declarative components in JSX and more efficient document object model (DOM) diffing through Virtual DOMs. Nonetheless, while this front-end development revolution has led to significant change in the developer experiences we see in the JavaScript landscape and to even more momentum in favor of decoupled Drupal architectures in the Drupal...

Preston So

Many front-end technologies, especially React, now consider the notion of declarative components to be table stakes. Why haven't they arrived in environments like the Drupal CMS's own front end? Many native CMS presentation layers tend to obsolesce quickly and present a scattered or suboptimal developer experience, particularly against the backdrop of today's rapidly evolving front-end development workflows. But according to Fabian Franz, there is a solution that allows for that pleasant front-end developer experience within...

Preston So

In this multi-part blog series that covers Fabian's session in detail from start to finish, we summarize some of the key ideas that could promise an exciting vision not only for the front-end developer experience of Drupal but also for the user experience all Drupal developers have to offer their customers. In this fifth installment in the series, we continue our analysis of some of the previous solutions we examined and consider some of the...

Preston So

A debate has been ongoing for several years about how Drupal's front end can compete against the primacy of JavaScript frameworks that are rapidly gaining steam in the wider web development community. In this multi-part blog series, we review the most important concepts behind this potential future for Drupal's front end, including Web Components, virtual DOMs, and what Drupal can learn from other ecosystems. In this second installment in the series, we examine how Drupal's...

Preston So

The question of where Drupal's front end is headed has led to much handwringing in the community, with a variety of ongoing discussions about whether decoupled Drupal is the future for Drupal's presentation layer. Out of all the debates in the community, few have engendered as much consternation and spilled ink as how, when, and whether to replace or augment Twig's functionality as the default theme engine for Drupal.

Preston So

One of the most formidable challenges of implementing any large-scale enterprise website is the choice of a framework that will ensure both high performance and long-term maintainability. Tag1 recently chose Laravel to serve the needs of a customer that is a national organization providing for millions of users and hundreds of affiliate chapters across the United States. Laravel was selected not only because of its favorable developer experience and ability to simplify business logic but...

Preston So

In the PHP landscape, perhaps no framework has made as daring of decisions and as innovative of choices as Laravel, the PHP ecosystem that has long not been afforded the spotlight offered readily to CMS ecosystems like Drupal and WordPress and the lower-level Symfony. Laravel has displayed some unconventional directions, including adopting Vue.js as its JavaScript framework of choice and eschewing some of the common features available in other web frameworks. Fortunately, with the rich...