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Monday August 19, 2024 definitely was a milestone:

1. I had the satisfaction of being able to remove the TwoTerribleTextareasWidget that I introduced two months ago, because the Experience Builder (XB) UI now is sufficiently developed to be able to place a component and populate its props using static prop sources — by now this terrible hack was now doing more harm than good, so: good riddance! 😀
2. a huge sigh of relief was heard emanating from Ghent, Belgium because finally comprehensive docs for the XB data model were published, and ADR #2 was published to capture the initial back-end decisions, but is expected to be superseded
   (an ADR or Architecture Decision Record can be a way to unambiguously capture current choices, knowing it will be superseded).

Those docs define all XB terminology (such as “static prop sources” in that first bullet above), which enables more precise communication. Contributing to XB becomes simpler thanks to those docs ¹, as does observing from a distance — with reviews to ensure accuracy & clarity from Simon “siramsay” Ramsay, Dave “longwave” Long, Ted “tedbow” Bowman, Feliksas “f.mazeikis” Mazeikis and of course, crucially, Alex “effulgentsia” Bronstein, whose proposed abstract data model it is that XB makes concrete.

While we’ll continue to iterate fast, it now is a hard requirement that every MR updates affected docs. That’s why several updates already have been committed.

Docs to come for other aspects!

For a huge DX leap forward for both those working on XB itself as well as those working on the Starshot Demo Design System (spearheaded by Kristen Pol): Felix’ MR to auto-create/update Component config entities for all discovered Single-Directory Components (SDCs) landed — if they meet the minimum criteria.
For example, each SDC prop must have a title defined, because otherwise XB would be forced to expose machine names, like I mentioned at the start of last week’s update. So: XB requires SDCs to have rich enough metadata to be able to generate a good UX.
That also allowed Omkar “omkar-pd” Deshpande to remove the awkward-but-necessary-at-the-time add/edit form we’d added months ago. When installing the demo_design_system theme, you’ll see something like:

Ted helped the back end race ahead of the front end: while we don’t have designs for it yet (nor capacity to build it before DrupalCon if they would suddenly exist), there now is an HTTP API to get a list of viable candidate field properties that are able to correctly populate a particular component prop. These are what in the current XB terminology are called dynamic prop sources ^{2 3}.

The preview in the XB UI has been loading component CSS/JS for a while, but thanks to Dave & Ted it now also loads the default theme’s global CSS/JS.

Small(ish) but noteworthy

• Ted proved via a test that both symmetric and asymmetric translations work correctly in the current data model/field type implementation
• Bálint “balintbrews” Kléri & Ben “bnjmnm” Mullins fixed the component props form showing the wrong values
• Now that component trees started working (since last week), Jesse “jessebaker” Baker discovered that it is not actually possible to drag and drop a nested component 😀 Harumi “hooroomoo” Jang quickly squashed that bug!
• Felix and I were able to narrow down why images with spaces in the filename were being refused to be rendered by the SDC subsystem: Drupal core’s File entity type stores a file stream wrapper URI like public://cat and dog.jpg and considers that a valid URL … but it’s not! URIs cannot contain spaces — that should be encoded as public://cat%20and%20dog.jpg to be valid.
  SDC is right, the >10 year old PrimitiveTypeConstraintValidator is wrong! This is being added to the increasingly long list of low-level bugs in Drupal core that went unnoticed for over a decade, so we worked around it for now.
• Utkarsh “utkarsh_33” fixed a bug where the name/label of a component instance was lost.
• Finally, a hilarious one to end with: at some point, we set up the “canvas” to be to 10,000×10,000 pixels. Unfortunately, this means that people trying XB have sometimes gotten lost 😀
  So Jesse reduced it to a mere 3500×3500 pixels, for now that’s sufficient, later we’ll compute this dynamically.

Week 15 was August 19–25, 2024.

• Drupal
• Acquia
• Experience Builder

• More accurate previews, including for example the Olivero font stack, background and footer showing up.
• The ‘components’ listing, all auto-generated based on discovered SDCs meeting criteria.