DrupalCon Vienna 2017: Component Driven Frontend Development
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 26/09/2017

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