Drupal Dev Days Ghent 2022: sprints FTW!

So what was DDD Ghent like?

Statistics

I’m especially interested in sprinting on the CKEditor 5 module for Drupal core, since that’s what I am currently working on for Acquia, because that is one of the biggest must-haves/blockers for Drupal 10. 86% of issues worked on at DDD Ghent was not CKEditor 5, so … I’m hoping others will do blog posts similar to this one! :D

New contributors

I worked with at least a dozen people who’d never contributed to CKEditor 5 before. I mentored in various ways: how to do the issue write-up, how to debug, how to find examples, how to write a kernel test, how to use data providers, how to run and write a functional JS test, how to create a contrib-to-core CKE5 button upgrade path, etc.
I know that (my colleague and fellow CKEditor 5-in-core contributor) lauriii mentored scott_euser to help us get external images support, and he helped dawehner write a complex CKE5 plugin that the popular token_filter module will be able to use for its upgrade path too.

Thanks to all of you who contributed to the CKEditor 5 module in Drupal core last week (in alphabetical order): andreasderijcke, brentg DieterHolvoet, Dom., Eli-T, ifrik, jcnventura, joevagyok, marcvangend, mpp and seanB. Better still: several of these people started issues of their own and ended up collaborating on each other’s issues!

Takeaways

The #1 takeaway for Lauri and I was that the upgrade path we had written assumed valid text format + CKEditor 4 configuration, which was definitely a faulty assumption, since just like the text format admin UI had done historically, there was no validation for any of this: the site builder is expected to know valid filter orders and which filters ought not to be enabled while using CKEditor 4. This utter lack of validation and hence guidance is what CKEditor 5 definitely does much better. But … we need to get those sites upgraded to CKEditor 5 too. That was the top critical we found, and it’s already fixed: #3273312. Basically, most long-time Drupalists apparently create new text formats and always add filter_autop and filter_url to them out of habit. The majority of people testing the upgrade path ran into this!

But extra special thanks go to ifrik and Dom. — they worked on CKEditor 5 the entire week and both not only reported but also contributed to lots of issues!

The second most frequent hurdle was contrib CKE4 plugins not having any actionability: the user feels stuck. We’re improving on that in #3273325. And more importantly, we’re starting to see that some modules are obsolete, which means core can (and MUST!) provide an upgrade path for certain contrib modules — see #3274278 for the first of that, and we now have a Drupal handbook page where coordination is now happening.

And despite not feeling well at all, lauriii still attended the magnificent live accessibility testing that we got from Bram Duvigneau, where he basically applauded our CKEditor 5 toolbar configuration admin UI. (And found some hurdles in CKEditor 5 itself when using NVDA.)

So I’d say: the sprints at DDD were a big success!

And not just on the technical front: I got to show my hometown to many fellow Drupalists, so I have many beautiful memories to look back to :)

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