Component Driven Frontend Development

Pages are dead - long live components.

Do you recognise any of the following problems:

• Designers design pages which then need to be broken up by frontend developers
• Elements of a page are poorly named or misunderstood
• Static HTML prototypes and style guides produced early in the project can't be easily ported into the backend CMS
• The static prototype and real site begin to drift away from each other as the project goes on, there is no longer a clear representation of the frontend
• The Drupal theme becomes complicated and confused.
• The design has become lost in translation and walls of indirection have sprung up between design and development teams.
• This talk describes a component based approach to web design and development.

Rather than having the designers design some key pages of a site, get them to design components instead. Breaking things down into small and easily identifiable pieces or 'componentisation' is a practice used by developers and designers alike to help them solve complex problems.

With a component based approach your development team can maintain a catalogue of templates independent of the backend CMS.

When the backend work starts, these components will then be integrated into Drupal. This talk will describe a method for doing this which does not cause complex themes or copying pieces of template code out of the frontend prototypes.

This talk will cover:

• The general approach to component based development
• A method for developing components independent of the backend system which will be used
• How to integrate the components with Drupal 8
• An overview of the advantages of this approach