We can never get enough of SDC, the front-dev friendly API to implement and share UI components for Drupal. So, let’s rejoice together by discovering the biggest improvement since the introduction of the API: we will soon be able to implement form elements directly with SDC, only with UI logic and front technologies, without messing with backend APIs.

Pierre, one of the maintainers of SDC in Core, will show you all the cool stuff which can be done with this addition.

Prerequisite

Knowledge about SDC and components-based theming.
And/or about Drupal Admin UI, especially display building tasks (Block Layout, Layout Builder, Views...)

Target Audience

Front developers, design system owners, ambitious site builders

Outline

The introduction of SDC to Core in 2023 had a significant impact on the Drupal ecosystem by starting a movement to embrace design system methodology, helping the front-designers to implement ambitious shareable designs, and bringing display building back to the forefront.

However, the UI components related to form inputs can’t be implemented as SDC yet and are still managed the old way, with abstruse PHP classes.

Date picker, interactive data table, file uploader, slider, toggle, draggable tree view… they often constitute around 20% of design system scopes and their absence is felt heavily by project teams and the contrib space.

Good news! We will land support to form elements in SDC in 2026 and it will be a game changer. Full component libraries will be packageable as Drupal themes and shared between projects, and front devs will finally get the full ownership of design implementations.

It will also be the opportunity to clean large parts of the rendering pipeline by finalizing the split between UI logic and business logic.

We will explore together how we can use those new UI components programmatically in front and back development.

And we will discover exciting demos about their use from Admin UI, leveraging them as Field Widgets to build an Entity Form Display.

Learning Objectives

How to build and share UI components for form inputs
How to use them in projects, both programmatically and from Admin UI

Experience level
Intermediate