Drupal 8: Blocks & Layouts Everywhere Initiative

Hi, dear community

I'm trilled to announce we are working on #CodeSprintUA organisation within DrupalCamp Kyiv 2017 for June 11 2017.

At this moment we have a bunch team already set u p

• OpenY - lead Dmytro Danylevskyi
• Open Social - lead Taras Kruts
• Panels for Drupal 8 - lead Dima Storozhuk

Hi, dear community

I'm trilled to announce we are working on #CodeSprintUA organisation within DrupalCamp Kyiv 2017 for June 11 2017.

At this moment we have a bunch team already set u p

• OpenY - lead Dmytro Danylevskyi
• Open Social - lead Taras Kruts
• Panels for Drupal 8 - lead Dima Storozhuk

Backdrop (a new CMS that is a Drupal 7 port with added Drupal 8 goodies) has an interesting new layout system. it's one of its attractive features.

I'm curious if this feature could be ported to Drupal.

Details and a video:
https://groups.drupal.org/node/433933

Building communities is an artsy science that is a strategic initiative for organizations of all kinds from nonprofit to for-profit. In this webinar, we will remove the mystery of building thriving online communities. We will look at community building best practices from leading community managers such as Jono Bacon of Ubuntu, and will understand how to use these pro-tips to grow and nurture global communities through a case study on Drupal.

Why Should You Attend This?

o To learn how the Drupal community grows and is nurtured
o To learn about the community management best practices

Drupal 8 will ship with a fancy new template engine (Twig) and a simpler theme layer. In this webinar, our speaker will show you some goodies from Twig and give you a walkthrough on how to get started with it.

He will also talk about the major problems that people were facing in working with Drupal 7 and what the community has done to make it better. This webinar will show - in both practical examples and on a broader scale - why Drupal 8 will make peace between backenders and frontenders.

Why Should You Attend This?

Drupal 8 is taking the same path as other MVC (Model View Controller) frameworks like Ruby and Symfony, which makes it easier for developers to make an easy entry. Much of the Drupal code which seemed alien before now seems familiar to developers with experience in other frameworks.

Brief: Drupal 7 is a brilliant content management platform, but not without limitations. You’d often find site builders, developers and project managers struggling with its pain points like deployment–which can be a real nightmare if not performed correctly and not being able to use the same block in two regions.

​In this webinar, the speaker will touch base with various pain points that hit us on a day-to-day basis while working with Drupal 7 and introduce the features and improvements of Drupal 8 that will help you overcome these pain points and make your life easier.​

At Drupal Dev Days we had a discussion about Layouts in Drupal 8.

Attendees:
- Michael Schmid (Schnitzel) Initiator of Discussion, works at Amazee Labs, builds big websites, uses Panels & Panelizer
- Bram Goffings (aspilicious) Maintainer of Display Suite
- Jesse Beach (jessebeach) Working at OCTO, Involved in Spark & Scotch D8
- Wim Leers (Wim Leers) Working at OCTO, Involved in Spark & Scotch D8
- Fredrik Lassen (frega) Works for Wunderkraut, they build big websites and uses Panels & Panelizer

The status of Drupal 8 core and contrib is awesome. People start to bootstrap real projects!

You might ask soon: But how are we going to deal with layout in our bigger projects?
Say, i need a hub page containing some ordered / wrapped widgets...
It's not a view, placing blocks or trying to use fields is a bad match.
You can't believe this needs custom code in Drupal 8! What about Drupal 7 tools like Panels?

You get it, it's time for another massive Drupal 8 Contrib Sprint!

Hi all,

I have created a survey for my presentation on Blocks & Layouts at Drupal Dev Days Szeged.

If you want to share your take on dealing with Blocks & Layouts in Drupal 7 and your perspective on Drupal 8, go ahead and fill this one out:

https://dasjo.webform.com/form/11188

Also feel free to share my tweet

https://twitter.com/dasjo/status/446299426047660033

Did I miss any options in the survey? I'd be happy to received some feedback and will keep you posted with the results and my slides after Drupal Dev Days.

Greetings,
dasjo

Looking at its issues they all seem to be abandoned and many moved to D9?

Is it possible to pass context to a block plugin in Drupal 8 (core)? Some of the early initiative discussion implied this would be possible but I have been able to find out how I would do it.

Example use case: Create a "Contact User" block, place it on user pages (picks up context from user page), but also place it on the "Help" page and the "Contact Us" page but for those pages set what users should be used. We have recently started creating all of our Panel panes this way in D7 and it is very effective

Hoping to make this a weekly call to get an update on SCOTCH progress, specifically what has been done lately, what is in progress, what needs reviewing, how you can help.

The agenda is fairly open for this first call but the idea is to pick a few things to focus on, assign people who can work on them, and set up some milestones.

In Drupal 7, not only do you have region.tpl.php in which there's ample opportunity to customize wrapper markup around blocks, you are also able to override block markup on a per-region basis via a block--REGION_NAME.tpl.php file, as well as alter any block variable based on $region within your THEME_NAME_preprocess_block() function.

The big picture

Problem

"As a content author I want to make a quick change to a block on a page I am editing without having to wade through many levels of navigation or a sea of options."

As part of the Blocks and Layouts initiative for Drupal 8, we are decoupling "layouts" from themes. Contrib themes will still be able to provide their own special layouts designed to work best with the rest of the theme, though what we hope to enable for site builders is the ability to switch layouts without switching themes and to switch themes without switching layouts. Primarily what I mean by layout currently is what themes now do in page.tpl.php, though potentially, we'll be able to reuse layouts for arranging fields in a node.

As you may or may not know Blocks and layouts is a design problem that I have been working on for the better part of three years since I first started working at Acquia. Back then Jeff Noyes, Dries and myself were just focused on introducing drag-drop blocks to Drupal Gardens and didn't have a view to the wider problem of layouts because really at that point seven was not even out and it just seemed too big a problem to solve.

There's a lot of discussion about routing going around, and to help clarify it, I'm putting together this example of a complex-but-reasonable case for the set of determinations a Drupal 8 site may need to make in order to fully resolve to a single router. I'm hoping that such an example will help bound the discussion and allow us to tease apart the appropriate separation of concerns for the remaining challenges we face.

A saw EclipseCG's session at DrupalCon Munich where he demonstrated the great improvement work he has done to Blocks and Layout for D8. I am really looking forward to be able to start experimenting with that.

However, the demo also showed a typical case for where we can greatly improve the usability, and UX feedback for site builders when, as in this demo, adding a new block from the library.

As it works today:

1 - Click the "Add block..." link
2 - The library page replaces the page
3 - Pick a block and you get to a third page