The Drupal front end in 2020

Drupal 8 was a monumental leap forward for the Drupal front end, including Twig theming, asset library management, and no more theme functions in core. Meanwhile, the front-end landscape around us has evolved considerably, leading many of us to ask questions challenging Drupal’s traditional role as a customizable front end coupled tightly with a capable CMS.

For instance, the ongoing JavaScript renaissance has contributed to growing interest in fully decoupled Drupal, in which Drupal serves as a content store exporting data via RESTful API to client-side applications, whose JavaScript variants are typically rendered isomorphically on both the server and client. But this jettisons so much of what we have taken for granted in Drupal’s front end, particularly display and layout management.

But this session is not solely about the here and now. This session is about where we want the Drupal front end to be in four years for Drupal users and front-end developers. In short, where do we want to go? From the user's perspective, what is the ideal experience for administering and working with Drupal? What ideal user experience do we anticipate in a world where advancements in interactivity are accelerating? How will users interact with Drupal in 2020?

From the technical perspective, how do we get there? Are there better approaches to achieve the interactivity that developers and business increasingly want to build, such as progressively decoupled Drupal (decoupled components of a page outputted by Drupal) or exporting presentation data as well as structured data (e.g. Panels configuration in JSON)? Or is the future of Drupal's front end fully decoupled?

Here are some of the questions we'll dig into:

• What will Drupal's user experience look like in 2020?

• What's possible now and in the future for Drupal user interfaces?

• What increasingly demanding expectations will users have of Drupal's editorial and administrative experience in 2020 (e.g. optimistic UI, non-blocking workflows, no-latency feedback, and offline workflows)?

• How will front-end developers (increasingly JavaScript-focused), themers, designers, site builders, and content editors interact with Drupal in the future?

• How do we address the dueling and often contradictory expectations of front-end developers and Drupal users to best prepare us for Drupal's front-end future in 2020?

• How will the core strategic initiatives like API-first Drupal and Theme Components move us towards these goals? Are they too ambitious, or not ambitious enough?

Attendees should have a broad understanding of the Drupal front end and theme layer and, before arrival, may want to review the current debate in the Drupal community about the risks and rewards of decoupled Drupal and approaches currently in vogue in the larger JavaScript community (esp. isomorphic rendering, abstract [virtual] DOMs, and JavaScript-only stacks). No specific knowledge about a particular JavaScript framework or library is presumed.