This is a transcript. For the full video, see Claro - the new Drupal Admin UI - Tag1 TeamTalk #010.
Preston So: [00:00:00] Hello, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to another episode of Tag1 Team Talks, the webinar and podcast series about emerging web technologies. I'm your host Preston So. I'm the editor in chief at Tag1 consulting and the author of Decoupled Drupal in Practice. Today's topic is of a huge amount of interest in the Drupal community right now, and it's a personal interest to me as well, because I'm very excited about being development and about themes in Drupal.
Today we're talking about the new Claro administration theme in Drupal 8. And joining me today are my dear friends. Cristina Chumillas, based in Barcelona, Front-end Developer at Lullabot. Cristina is a front end developer and designer or what some people call front end designer or UI developer.
Too many names these days for these titles. She works as a front end developer at Lullabot. And Cristina is a Drupal Core Usability Maintainer, Co-organizer of the Drupal Admin UI and JavaScript Modernization Initiative , an initiative I care a lot about, and I'd love to see work from and front-end track share for DrupalCon Europe as well.
We're also joined by two mainstays here on the program. Ah, Fabian Franz in Switzerland Senior Technical Architect and Performance Lead at Tag1, Fabian's one of the five Drupal 7 core branch maintainers. He's also one of the top 50 contributors to Drupal 8. And maintainer for several Drupal 8 core subsystems, like Big Pipe, Dynamic Page Cache and Theme API.
Chances are if you're in Drupal 8, you've touched something Fabian's worked on. And finally we're joined by my friend here, actually in New York, Michael Meyers, Managing Director of Tag1. And by the way, just before we get started, this is about one of the Drupal 8 core strategic initiatives.
So, we are very excited to talk more about this topic. And if you want to check out some of our past talks and some of our previous webinars and podcasts, go to tag1.com/tagteamtalks. And if you liked this talk, please remember to up vote, subscribe and share it with your family and friends, your grandma and grandpa and your grandkids too, alrighty.
And before we get started, I want to make sure to give a little bit of background on Tag1 and here to do that is Michael Myers.
Michael Meyers: [00:02:09] Thanks Preston. Cristina, Fabian really appreciate you guys joining us.
Tag1 is the number two all time contributor to Drupal. We work with a lot of other technologies, but are definitely pioneering the Drupal platform. And one of our goals with these talks is to cover the future of Drupal. Where the platform's going, and Claro, is one of the, you know, around 10 strategic initiatives that the Drupal community has established. So it's critically important to the future of Drupal. Drupal's ability to compete in the CMS marketplace. and we want to do more talks on this topic. So, you know, please let us know if there are other initiatives that we should prioritize. We're going to work our way through all of them and give everybody updates. We recently did a talk on the Drupal auto updater.
I suppose Preston mentioned, talk about, check out the Tag1.com/tagteamtalks link. If you want to check that out. It's also on YouTube and Apple podcasts and all that good stuff. and we help develop and sponsor that initiative along with folks like the European commission. so please check out that talk and, Cristina, Fabian and Preston, thanks so much for joining us today.
Preston So: [00:03:20] Thank you so much, Michael. And just to go ahead and kick things off. Hey Cristina, I'm one of the things that I'm really curious about is what, well , the main topic for today, Claro. Um what exactly is Claro, when and how did it come about? And one point of clarification, the Admin UI and JavaScript initiative with and Claro are, are those part of the same initiative or two separate things?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:03:41] You're nailing it. That's a key question. so Claro is a part of the Admin UI. modernization initiative. It actually started us two different initiatives and we ended up joining forces because the goals were the same, which were mainly modernizing the Admin UI. Claro was a result of several UX studies and a lot of feedback from both marketers, and people that is selling Drupal.
And also from several surveys that came up and. Yeah, I would say, Claro itself, it's more like an initiative and it's more and more becoming something so huge that we might need that ended up talking about several initiatives, but maybe it's on a spoiler, and I might talk about that later in the interview.
Preston So: [00:04:43] Sure. And Claro was one of those things that's very exciting, you know, and I think it's, it's a really important inflection point in Drupal's ability to serve all of the users that we're serving. is how did the discussion around Claro start, and in terms of those UX studies that you mentioned, what were some of the results from these usability studies and what did they show.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:05:05] So, I would say, Claro or the UI part of the initiative itself. probably started around 2016 actually, on DrupalCon New Orleans, several of us had several conversations about the need of refreshing the UI. and it actually ended up being unanimous and the new, um. It had to be the new theme. Frontend theme, ended up being a whole profile for testing Drupal. And actually the real kickoff for the UI refresh started in Vienna with several people involved in these first conversations. And, we joined forces Several sprints, well, several BOFs and a design sprint, during the sprints in Vienna.
And also it happened that at the same time in being under was also happening. The kickoff of the JavaScript modernization initiative, which a goal was actually going to replace the UI also, but with a JavaScript, and replacing all the JavaScript. So actually we ended up, well, we discussed a lot of things and we ended up joining forces, for Frontend United.
I think it goes, 2018 or something like that. Anyway, we ended up joining forces, and then we had to establish, goals, together, which was a really difficult, because the moment that you're talking about your replacing the whole UI with, Javascript and also on the other side, I'm talking about redesigning the UI.
You have to, um , set goals and , and set limits and, timelines. And that was really, really challenging. And, because of the first, we, we started with several tests, with the Drupal community. Actually, we started with a survey, I think more than 300 people participated on this survey and several, there was a lot of points made there.
But one of the clearer ones was that the UI looked all dated. I mean, 7 was a great design by the time that it was made, but probably, the moment the survey was made. It probably had like eight or 10 years. I'm not really sure. So it, it needed that refresh. Also, not only the design itself, but also some patterns there.
So, like for example, some things that also people complained was. The complexity, like, from off interfaces, like with a lot of paragraphs and, and paragraphs inside paragraphs, and some problems with lists in, well, there were several feedbacks in there that would kind of try to, put or, involve in the whole initiative itself.
But it was clear that the redesign was needed. So that was actually one of the first goals, redesigning the UI. And that's where Claro actually appeared as a, as a thing, which is, the first, the easier way to get a redesign.
Fabian Franz: [00:08:47] Do you also have some kind of technical goals by example to embrace component-based design or to embrace? besides JavaScript to embrace fully decoupled way. Or, is there, like any technological goals you have set yourself besides Drupal 8's goals?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:09:08] I can't really talk that much about the JavaScript side because I was involved on some conversations, but I really wasn't aware of the of the goals said there. what I knew, what I remember is that there are some constraints at the moment that you want to, completely replace , a UI with, with JavaScript. And that's what we had to deal with because we called on completely replaced everything because we were losing a lot of parts from the Drupal frontend . That is so it's still important for us.
Preston So: [00:09:49] And I want to dig more into the Claro design itself and, and really talk about how that came to be. but since Phoebe had mentioned some of the technical goals, I'm curious what, what were some of the other overarching goals? Were there a particular outcomes in mind when it came to new users in Drupal or in terms of certain personas, I'm kind of curious, you know, what were you, trying to accomplish as part of this amazing work on Claro.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:10:18] That's, that's a really good point. Because, actually, one of the, one of the other outcomes, from this initial surveys was that, we have this kind of, it reads a user in, in Drupal, which is a site builder, which it's not.
It doesn't exist in other worlds. And it ended up like being, uh. A super admin for, a web administrator and usually have a lot of perms, a lot of permissions. And the thing is that the final user, that the person that is going to spend eight hours per day, as its main goal, which is going to be creating content on Drupal, is going to use exactly the same tools as a site builder.
and we're talking about using the, the management or the, I mean, menu, which actually has the structure, and the content, tabs on the top. And, later after that, some stock inside configuration. And then how do you deal with permissions to access some menu items and some of them not giving access to them.
So the structure, the, um. information, structure was, also a little bit, a little bit confusing for a content authors. So that's actually one of the other things that we found, during these initial tests. And we ended up trying to focus or work on the content authors and trying to work towards them. And one of the in, well, initially, one of the walls was also trying to create a new menu, for content authors and replacing that for this new role. and actually adding a new role that it's called, that it's called . Editor or content editor, I think, or content author. I don't remember.
It's on Drupal.org, I can send you. It's on the ideas queue and it's actually one of the goals that we still have to, to create a better, um. Experience for, for content authors. But, with the time, with the months after working with, with collateral, we realize that it's a really nice and cool idea to try to have a better experience for content authors, but we can't forget a site builder experience.
Like, for example, Views UI and. And and, paragraphs. well paragraphs. It's more of a, something for authors, but I don't know the modules page or this kind of things. We can't forget that. Yeah. So we're trying to give a solution for both.
Preston So: [00:13:21] I love the thinking around, all of the personas. And I think you really are right in saying that Drupal really is unique in the fact that we have to deal with these site builder folks as well, who have a very different set of requirements, a very different set of pathways.
They go down, within the Drupal interface. And it's amazing how much thought you and the team have given to this. now to talk about some of the inspiration behind Claro. I'm kind of curious, did you, and, you know, look at some of other, some of the other CMSs that exist in the wild in terms of taking inspiration.
Did you look at WordPress or look at some of the newer CMS that have been emerging? is there any inspiration, or, or sort of model that you're kind of following with, the Claro thing?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:14:09] So, yeah. so at the beginning, like I would say one year ago or something like that . Because we were talking, we were thinking mainly on content authors, and we were saying, Oh, ideally for a content author, you should have like a drag and drop interface, something super cool.
And if you think a little bit about that, it's super good and very fly. And we were, we're working towards an interface that goes super, close to too good a Gutenberg. And we were getting some inspiration from there. But the real wall in Drupal is that you can't actually replace the whole admin interface, like these and forget about the whole thing behind it.
And it wasn't that easy being, just, using a JavaScript. Um. layer that will replace everything. So we had to do one step, one step back and think again about what were the actual and really stick, technical, options that we had. And also, if you might know there were some issues with . accessibility on with American number day, aware how it's right now.
But, we kind of thought that the best way of trying to give something soon to people was, actually starting with a classic, admin theme, a classic things that have going for the couple or something like that. And that's actually one of the goals that we also, um. one of the needs that we saw on the surveys because, there was an urgent need to at least refresh the UI.
At least the colors or something like that. That's what, why we ended up, having Claro as a part of the initiative. Which is basically a seven, a clone of seven with, just the colors change. I mean, it's not like that obviously would mean a lot of months, several people working on that, but, that, that was the, the, the switch that we made from just reinventing the wheel for for Drupal to something that goes more realistic and achievable to replace, the current UI.
And that's where Claro came. And the good part of it is that we can ship Claro, with, you can use Claro, and it's just still stable and usable because it's still have, all the styles that seven has. So it might look with a different gray or might not look like gray, but it is still, it's still useful.
So that's the goal behind it.
Fabian Franz: [00:17:10] one quick question, because I don't know as, I just might also not know what's a kind of state of Claro, kind of like, where are you basically, and I'm 100% is like, like finished and 0% is just the planning phase. Like, where are you kind of lacking in progress and those initiatives?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:17:30] That's a really tricky question. I mean, I will I could say, we are, just after we were on the beta phase. we got into Drupal core on 8.8, and because we reached the beta and we probably, or, or at least on the next release or internal releases and most we will be stable. So Claro is perfectly usable.
There are several sites in production already using it. So. It's usable. As I was saying, Claro is, it's based on seven. So if you use seven on your admin interface, you can use Claro. But the thing that we are seeing right now is that it's, what I was mentioning earlier, is that we want to change a lot of interfaces.
So for example, and Views UI, you will really want to change that. But. Putting all these efforts inside the Claro and saying Claro is not going to be done because we haven't redesigned the whole ViewsUI. It's like, okay, this initiative is never going to end. So that's, that's the key point here.
I mean, Claro probably it's going to be considered a finish the moment that. We'd have to go back and replace everything that goes into seven and it works and from there, several initiatives that are going to start from there. And that's a key part because we can have an initiative that it's called, Admin UI refresh and put everything in there on that umbrella, because we are not going to end up, I don't know, in five years.
I mean, we'll, we'll always find something new to renew. So that's probably the key point.
Fabian Franz: [00:19:26] I think that's a great strategy. I've also learned, in the hard way, basically, that it's relative to initatives and iterative changes just, but best for score, like introduce something and something new and slowly improve and some point you're finished amazingly.
but yeah, that works way better than. We have to redo everything first.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:19:55] Exactly. Yeah. Because we actually ended up talking about, creating a new user role with it, with its own menu and maybe someone, some people. We're talking a lot, even our dashboard for content authors with predefined blogs. And what about changing the whole layout because we are just, working with a layout, designed some years ago.
And what about Views UI? What about, um. The modules page. What about, I know there are so many parts on the Admin UI that will need a whole initiative by themselves that I think it's fine.
Fabian Franz: [00:20:39] Okay, perfectly know. I mean, even just converting all of those templates from the old engine to track, it lists a tremendous amount of roadmap.
Med was basically just mainly copying things and putting into a new language, and it's still took for quite a long time. So I can't even imagine the fortitude you need to do those kind of tricks to build something new, which is stable and etc. Props to the answer to that.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:21:04] Yeah.
Preston So: [00:21:05] And I definitely want to return to the topic of, the scope of the initiative and, and cause I'm very interested in how you manage to keep things really tight.
but at first not the design. how did the design come to be and what were some of the goals there?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:21:23] So, actually, the design started the dogma almost at the, at the beginning. And we had to be super clear that it had to look different from seven. So the first time that you get into a page with Claro, you should be able to see the difference with seven.
But we couldn't change the main colors and we couldn't go to a dark interface, or we couldn't go to a to start using red because, you know, it's not Drupal's colors. So, or green or gray. So we ended up trying to look for more light and vivid colors, for, for Claro and we started to get inspiration from, for example, material design and a lot of other design systems.
Uh. That you can find anywhere on the internet. Because, we actually didn't want to reinvent the wheel with the design either because what you actually want on an admin interface, it's something that works and that people understand. So we didn't want to go crazy with fancy buttons and, and fancy field sets.
Actually. we tried to go a little bit crazy at the beginning with the fields and the moment that you focused on the field, the, the old line goes, change the color and then a line came there and it goes like, no, no, no. Stop. On the first accessibility review, they say, okay, it looks fancy, but people are going to get.
Not everybody is going to to get used to it. It's not good for everybody. So let's just go to the basics. And that's where we went. So together with trying to be different from what it goes there on a color's perspective, but trying to keep, um. Use known patterns for everything. That's when we ended up trying to look for a lighter interface and a brighter blue that it actually started being a super, neon and bright blue.
And we ended up making it more, a little bit more dark. By the time passed at, especially to comply with accessibility, standards on and so on. But after that, most of the elements just came together. We based a lot of forward designs on. Well, other are designs that are already there that probably have been based on all over this and designs.
So we try to keep a focus goes on. Known patterns and that's most of it.
Fabian Franz: [00:24:27] One quick question, will there be a dark mode, supported?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:24:35] Maybe that could be another initiative. Okay. So there are designs for that. actually Sasha super, excited about that and I really think it's a cool, and actually, I think it's a needed feature, but it's not on the, it's not on the MVP. So. I would say probably it might start being a contrib thing first, with a time.
it might end up, uh. For being part of core because it's not that we, we've been asked, for having a dark mode, a dark mode only people is actually, I'm not sure if you've seen that on the IBS Q, but there's an idea that was actually asking to remove the colors. A module from the Drupal core and it regards a discussion about, people wanting to, kind of, customize the colors or the, the interface for each client. And, the problem is that giving, the given the color module is giving too much. Um. Of control for people that doesn't have enough knowledge. So it's not just about the dark more, it's about also Claro.
It's about colors. And other feedback that we've had about Claro is that with adding a lot of space between elements. And there's people that go on to have stuff more compacted, and that's another thing that people will like to customize and also fun sizes. So we have like a set of separate several things that people will like to customize and we'll have to, we have to decide. If some of them hang. It's to go on under the theme of personalization or a user personalization side. And it's like a whole discussion.
Fabian Franz: [00:26:51] Well, yeah, maybe it's another. Okay. Now the big problem is kind of module obviously is accessibility because it can make totally inaccessible things with it, very easily.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:27:04] Exactly one of the things that we did. with Claro is trying to make all. All most of the fonts, bigger. And one of the first feedback that we've got is like, Oh, okay, that's great, but I want my fonts smaller. And it's like, yeah, but smaller than that, it's not accessible compliance. So you, and you have to end up giving people the tools that they need.
So it's, I think it makes sense to have like an evolution where you can. Crystallize some parts of the thing.
Preston So: [00:27:41] And just jump into a accessibility even further. Cause I think this is a very interesting topic to a lot of our audience. you know, besides things like font sizes, color contrast, all of the things that you know, we know are very important for accessibility outcomes.
What other considerations or concerns that you have about accessibility and how did you address those during the process?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:28:03] So that's a really good point. We thought that we were doing it right. we started having a on the design side, we started, doing some research, some stuff that would write on the internet, and we thought that we were doing it properly and until, few a few months of work, we didn't reach to Andrew McPherson, one of the accessibility maintainers and when he saw the design he goes like "Nice, but here's the list of a huge list of things that you have to change". One of them actually being that field that we were, designing super fancy. So we had to change a little bit, some things. And the main problem there is that, um. We were trying to have a, someone reviewing designs and it wasn't, they were an already implemented, so you can't actually use the same tool.
So it wasn't easy to get someone's on a PNGs or PDF. So it wasn't easy for them, not for fun or other people to reveal the accessibility. And the moment that we went, because we, we started developing on Github and the moment that we. Go back through to the D rupal.org rupal.org And having Claro as, as a contrib, saying to people to let people, to give a credit to users that were actually, contributing.
So the moment that we had that in Drupal core a lot of other people came and helped us with accessing the different views and we realize that we didn't dig enough so. Before going into beta, we had the a bunch of accessibility issues that we had to solve, and we still have some things, but if we, I would say we had like, okay, four or more rounds of accessibility reviews, which is great.
And of course we still need to work on that. I think that's, that will be a thing that we'll be doing forever to be sure everything works fine.
Preston So: [00:30:25] Absolutely. And so one of the things I wanted to ask in addition to that is, you know, before we get into some of the more innovative and really unique aspects of Claro, how did you keep the design scoped?
one of the things that we know, you know, working in design and UX is that. Things have a tendency to get out of control. You mentioned earlier, just a few moments ago that it was very challenging to deal with a lot of the feedback of people coming in saying, let's do this and this and this and this too.
from an operational or logistical or project management standpoint, how easy or how hard was it to manage that kind of feedback and what did you do to keep the scope type?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:31:07] Okay. Um. I guess the easier way, just having not having enough resources to go crazy. I think that's a key point that. That's, that's the best way to actually , not having enough people to, to go to do all the work and also having a tight, release date because we needed to have Claro, for 8.8, because otherwise it goes too late to where to get Claro as a stable for 8.9 or nine. So that goes down the, the main point that the, that we followed.
So we ended up. creating like a, the list of , components, that were needed, to be, , migrated. And, even though there were some of them that just get existing with, seven styles, they were used they are usable still now. So we tried to. the define a line and just focus the design on that things and not going crazy with crazy ideas, that, it's really cool to think about new interfaces, and new layouts and new everything. But the first things first, and we need to finish the MDP.
Preston So: [00:32:30] I definitely understand that. and, it's wonderful to see that, it's, available for everyone to use and, it's, I've, I've seen it a lot actually already. Um , and so that brings us to kind of the more innovative or, really cutting edge parts, which we've already talked a little bit about, but, you know, I wanted to ask, what is, what does Claro do better and how is it pushing the envelope of not only Drupal's front end, but also front end in general.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:32:59] So, the good part of, now that we have, well, especially when it goes contrib, but now that it's in Drupal core, it's also really good. Is that. There are a lot of things that, nobody there, nobody wanted to get into changing when said, we had seven in there because it goes to us , getting into something too difficult.
And that you are probably changing this. And because they were changing this, you had to touch that, that, that, and you ended up like with 10 related issues. So , I would say, I dunno. I think I lost a little bit, about the question that you are asking actually.
Preston So: [00:33:48] Sure, no problem. I guess, you know, what makes Claro unique, are there things that make it really distinctive compared to other admin interfaces or themes?
What are some of the things that really, you know, kind of call out to people who are looking at it.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:34:09] Now, I know why I got lost. So basically, the thing is that, I was saying that because, a lot of things that, has had a Claro has changed, is that, there were several , needs the UI, that were just, relying on all components, like for example, the field and , the, the image widgets, for example, with a drag and drop, or for example, the widget, the component for the image and the file , widget for the Admin UI, weren't even a finished for, seven. So Claro was able to make that, um. Work and like, for example, the dropdown thanks to Claro well, not thanks to Claro, but we, we kind of, came, several people, wanting to have something. Similar to a drop down or something like that for, similar to chosen or something like that. And then the discussion started unrelated to accessibility and everything related to that.
So it's pushing a lot of things that are around, on the web already. And that Drupal, I mean, the Drupal, Admin interface was just getting stuck on the classic components that Seven was giving. So I would say, um. It's a chance to modernize the interface and getting a lot of common patterns that are wrong, on the web that make life easier for, for users.
And, I would say, also for front end developers, one of the key things, me that's being a front end developer. Is the post CSS, change. we don't work on plain. so we decided not to use a SAS, preprocessor, and we go for post CSS, which led us, um. Use done the last, fancy stuff on CSS, like variables and, and these kind of things.
And with post CSS, which is processed out and just get regular CSS. And that's great because we aren't just riding on CSS and it will be compatible in the future.
Preston So: [00:36:41] So for some of the audience that's a little less familiar with, post CSS, cause I find post CSS very interesting as a project that has an approach. Why did you move over to a post CSS? What were some of the advantages you gained from going over to post CSS?
Cristina Chumillas: [00:36:58] So for someone that testing around, on the front end development, will know for sure that SAS is giving a lot of stuff. Not plain CSS was not giving some years ago. So preprocessors like SAS were really useful. But, with the time with the new, things that have been, integrated into CSS 3 and all. All the newer things that are coming to the browsers and new browsers, and we're not going to talk about Internet Explorer, but all the new browsers and so on.
they get regular updates and they get the new specifications into the browsers super fast. So, well, super fast compared to some years ago. So it means that you can have several things on the new browsers like variables and, and some stuff like, well, I'd like to make your life easier as SAS will make, but instead of the need of having a us, a pre processor, a post processor, what does is, you're right.
Um. More than CSS and a post processor. What it does, it gives you per example, a prefixes for all browsers. It changes variables into the proper codes and everything. So, it converts the modern CSS that you're writing into something that it's more Internet Explorer friendly
Preston So: [00:38:41] I love the reference to Internet Explorer. It's still, you know, even though we gave Internet Explorer or IE6 a funeral there, so a lot of work, making sure that it's the modern browser.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:38:55] Yeah, especially if we are working with big companies with governments and so on, you can't just get rid of Internet Explorer , it's still there. Either we want on it or not, so we need to take care of it.
Preston So: [00:39:11] Yeah, absolutely.
Fabian Franz: [00:39:12] I mean, I sometimes think of post CSS. Like little bridge from the old to the new world that, there's also an, the JavaScript often called a shim and which allows, many of the modern JavaScripts, things as Babbel. But you could use the new language with the old JavaScript kind of like right now.
And, also components a lot of the time you had like shims. I could use it even if browser didn't support it. And that's basically post CSS or CSS for me. It also does some other things, but. That's kinda my, my high level explanation of how I like to think about it.
Preston So: [00:39:50] Yes, it's incredibly exciting and I'm going to be looking to see, some of the, the, the ways in which, well, I want to, I'm curious about some of the browser prefixes that y'all have chosen and, and how you're using post CSS and things of that nature. I'm going to look later on.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:40:05] That's, that's a really interesting world. You have a lot of plugins for Post CSS you have a lot of ways of dealing it, and it's really challenging to actually. choose the start that you prefer, but I really like it.
Preston So: [00:40:19] Yeah, well, we've got only a little bit of time left and it's, and, you know, it's incredible that, we've talked about, you know, some of the really interesting features of Claro that I find.
What are some of the, now let's talk about some of the gaps. What are some of the improvements that you want to see with, you know, Claro and Drupal's admin in general, and, you know, what does the roadmap look like? Let's start with the improvements that you want to see first.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:40:48] probably I would say, the one that I have more in mind is the general layouts that we can have on a, on a, Admin a page for, for any forum or whatever, because who hasn't wanted to create node edit forum that and play something on the sidebar on the right? I mean, it's not crazy. It's basic needs, so I would say, um. Something like that could be like next steps and something that could give me some more, flexibility or depending on the content that you're actually working with because it's not the same as, having, an edit form with a node with one or two fields as having a node with, I don't know, 40 fields or something like that, and actually who has to decide that the site builder, not the Drupal community in deciding what a node should look like. So I would say that's one of the most exciting parts.
And one of the basic things that should come or the most urgent things I would say. And also, I don't know, something related with changing appearance and of course, all other small, small things. It's like a changing Bill's UI, for example. I'm thinking again on the. Extend page, the modules page, but also the permissions page, which is crazy.
There was an attempt some years ago of doing so, but it was, it, it didn't, move forward because it was so much work. And I don't know, there are a lot of UI. Is that would ideally, become independent initiatives. So if anybody would like to do so, there's the, the ideas page on Drupal.org. feel free to go there and check for ideas in there because usually, every initiative starts there as an idea.
And from there, several people just say. I'm interested on that. Okay, let's go. Because we are 10 people, let's go and try to make that something real. So I will take, probably several of that needs are going to end up being in different initiatives. So if anybody wants to get involved. Just keep an eye on that.
And yeah, I would say that's the first step, just breaking a little bit. The, new, the, needs that the UI needs. And from there, I don't know. Let's see how we can make our reality, the JavaScript side and all these things.
Preston So: [00:43:59] Wonderful. And we've talked about some of the key features of the roadmap. You know, some of the ideas around, layout, customization and, and views UI, obviously, which are definitely not small things as we've, as we've admitted. What is your vision? I mean, you know, I know that this is a community led effort and there's a lot of people who are involved, a lot of ideas. but you know, you personally, must have a vision or, or, or some dream, a state that you want to end up in. can you, cause I, I love to talk about kind of, you know, where people are dreaming and where they want to end up, even though it's not realistic sometimes.
what is your kind of dream vision for Claro and, and all of the Drupal admin interface.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:44:46] So probably, I would separate Claro from the whole admin, UI modernization because Claro is more like focus on what it's in there. And now that when we have this team already working, then we can focus on the rest of the theme.
Well, the things that are going to need. So for example, if we are able to make Claro stable for the next release, we can say, Hi. Let's see, we have Claro done now let just start with the new, the Views UI and the views UI is going to use the Claro, components and look and feel. So it means that, um. It's going to be just a base.
And, the basic thing where that people is going to use, and I really just got into be some colors in the future. When you go going into the past, it's just going to be like changing the colors to the UI and the great things that are going to come are going to be good enough to forget about the huge effort, not forget, but to.
To say as this huge effort, as a basic thing that people build the staff over it. Because I think Drupal is like the perfect place to to do a lot of things, on a UI perspective. And I will really like to see this UI changing like substantially, like, not only, the layout on like saying two columns, three columns or something like that.
Also with new or JavaScript fancy, fancy things that you can see anywhere on the web, not probably not going that far as Gutenberg with a note edit forum. Because we have other, problems, well, not problems. all those trends in Drupal, which is moderate, modellated content, like structured content.
You can't have a Gutenberg-like, um. UI, if you have a node where you have always like five fields, it doesn't make any sense to have a drag and drop there. So probably having several ways of editing content or something like that. So I don't know, just experiencing, with new UIs and ways of interacting with content. I would . I'll really like to see how it ends up being, because that's the key because Drupal is going , no, it is the content management system. It's another front-end system or. Not the whole thing itself. I mean that, that key part of on some things, so.
Preston So: [00:47:46] Absolutely. Absolutely. Intelligently. I'll filter it. Yeah, let's, let's, let's get the layout team to build this. So, we're running out of time here. I see that. But, just to end with, you know, a call to action, people, around the community are obviously very interested in contributing to.
The Admin UI initiative and also to Claro. How can people get involved? What would be the way to get started with, helping out and, and making a mark on Drupal's design.
Cristina Chumillas: [00:48:21] So, there are several channels where, so basically we, all, the conversations usually happen, on Drupal's Slack channel.
there are different channels. For example, for the design, it's the. Admin UI Design channel and for the, Admin, the whole, Admin initiative. We have the Admin UI channel and there's also the JavaScript channel, which is more focused on the modernization while it's in general for JavaScript related to Drupal, but also.
Some of the conversations about the Admin UI refresh happened there a while ago. So I would say these three channels are the main ones to directly speaking with people online. Um. I would say for Drupal.org, And getting into a work, Claro has its own component. When you look for issues on, on Drupal.org For the for the Drupal project itself, for the Drupal core, you can filter by it by Claro component.
Or Claro theme, I think it's called. And about that, feel free to contact any of us like me _____ or whoever, is symbol of in the initiative. There is always a lot of people on the channels and of course to any, even we are in, just come and say, hi.
Preston So: [00:49:56] Wonderful. Well, as we have heard today, Claro is really changing the way that the Drupal admin UI looks and feels. I'm very excited to be seeing it a lot more around all of my Drupal sites and we've run out of time. But, I thank you so much for joining us today for this episode of tag one team talks, the webinar and podcast series on emerging web technologies.
By the way, we post all of these tag team talks episode at tag1.com/tagteamtalks. All of the links that we talked about today, including the link to the drupal.org page for the Claro module, including some of the Slack channels that we just mentioned, are going to be posted online with talk. And of course, if you liked this talk, if you're viewing us on YouTube, if you're seeing us on Reddit, if you're looking at us on hacker news, please remember to upvote, subscribe and share it with your friends and family, including.
Your garbage man on the street as well as any of your doormen or doorwomen or people who are working with you in your apartment building. Um. Please make sure to share this video with them as well. And as always, we'd love your feedback. We'd love any topic suggestions. Please write to us at tagteamtalks@ tag1consulting.com
I'd like to thank my friends today, Michael Meyers, Fabian Franz and Cristina Chumillas for an amazing conversation about the Claro theme.
Thank you. And until next time, goodbye.