As our team is expanding, and many people are contributing to the Drupal community, we've been attending a variety of Drupal Core meetings. After each meeting we put together an overview or recap of key talking points from each discussion. This article breaks down highlights from meetings this past week.
You'll find that the meetings, while also providing updates of completed tasks, are also conversations looking for community member involvement. There are many moving pieces as things are getting ramped up for Drupal 9, so if you see something you think you can provide assistance on, we encourage you to get involved.
Drupal Usability Meeting
October 8, 2019
Meetings are for anyone interested in usability and accessibility. Since these are two of the Drupal core gates, initiative leads often attend these meetings to request reviews of their current issues.
- Meetings take place on Tuesdays at 19:30 UTC.
- Meetings are held using Zoom. A link is posted to the #ux channel in the Drupal Slack account.
- Recordings are available on YouTube. Recent meetings use the standard format “Drupal Usability Meeting YYYY-MM-DD” to make them easier to find.
- This week’s recording: Drupal Usability Meeting 2019-10-08
This week, we discussed two issues:
- Hide “Save and insert” and “Additional selected media” from users by default
- Reference Field – Sort By settings – only shows 1 field label from 1 random bundle
The Media issue deals with a workflow challenge. If a field allows a limited number of Media entities, how do we let content editors choose from new (uploaded) items and those already in the media library? We agreed that the existing solution had too much information on the form and should be hidden by default. Sites that want to use the existing workflow can enable it.
When adding an entity-reference field, a site builder can choose how the options (presented to the content editor) will be sorted. The sort fields are presented to the site builder in a select element, with several problems:
- the options are not sorted
- different sort fields may have the same label
- when a field is reused, it may have different labels
An example of the last point: in the Umami demo theme, the title field is labeled “Title” on the Article content type and “Recipe Name” on the Recipe content type. In this situation, the current behavior is to show one of the labels, seemingly at random.
Out of the Box Initiative Meeting
October 8, 2019
- Umami’s language-switcher as a drop-down menu issue is ready for review and to be tested.
- Use Media images in Umami demo issue is ready and already RTBCed, but we need to wait for `Media Library` module to become stable before this patch can be merged.
- Keith Jay is creating some content for Umami video library landing page. He produced a short video making a chicken dish, and it’s looking great! New images for four new recipes are also finalized.
- Configure Umami to use Layout Builder to deliver original recipe content type designs issue is ready for review.
- New changes in 8.9 - 9x: 8.9 is planned to be LTS version, so no new feature should be introduced but ongoing improvements of what’s already existing.
- 8.9-9x coming out in few days and it will be possible to test patches on it.
- Ofer Shaal with Matt Glaman has been on optimization improvements using Blackfire and got 25% of improvement in Drupal installation time. One of their findings is captured in the issue Do not rebuild the router for each module installation if Drupal is being installed. Another finding is not yet documented in an issue, but will be soon, is the recommendation to install Layout Builder in Umami only after content was imported.
- Need help with working on Umami changes the admin interface language based on the current page.
Admin UI Meeting
October 09, 2019
- Meetings are for core and contributed project developers as well as people who have integrations and services related to core.
- Usually happens every other Wednesday at 2:30pm UTC.
- Is done over chat.
- Happens in threads, which you can follow to be notified of new replies even if you don’t comment in the thread. You may also join the meeting later and participate asynchronously!
- There are roughly 5-10 minutes between topics for those who are multitasking to follow along.
- The Admin UI Meeting agenda is public and anyone can add new topics in the document.
This weeks Admin UI meeting touched on important disccusion items such as:
- Beta status/inclusion into core: any important issue we need to unblock asap?
- Add Claro administration theme to core
- Sascha Eggenberger is going to help get the documentation updated.
- Start a plan to implement layout changes into the admin UI, or next-gen designs.
- It comes from the need to change some regions, like adding a right sidebar region available outside the node form, sticky action regions or a redesign of the Toolbar. The problem is that it isn’t only changes to the theme, it will need changes beyond it and we need to start a plan to get feedback and proposals.
- Conclusion is to create an ideas issue with wireframes to prepare a meeting during DrupalCon.
- Claro Documentation for the new Claro theme is still missing a few items.
- Recommended block configuration needs to be documented.
- How to switch from Seven (if there are any steps required besides enabling the theme).