Formbuilder UI - Drupal 8

Jeff Noyes put up http://jeffnoyes.com/content/drupal-cck-fields-ui , which is quite similair to our idea but focuses more on existing widget model. I hope we can find a good solution for existing widgets as well, right now our pallet for it is kind of hard to use.

I am going to reopen this, although I agree that they need seperate issues. Lets atleast have this issue open untill that happend.

Err.. this is an any version issue, and your D8 queue is not open yet.

I've been thinking about what the UI should look like too and I just took another look at that session from DC London. I like the 3 tab approach mentioned above -- schema, form, and display. But I have a couple other thoughts:

1 - Display has to allow for multiple views. Many sites I work on have a half dozen or more view modes for each content type. So I guess that would be sub-tabs under the display tab. But form builder would have to be smart enough to add every element to every display as it gets dragged in.

2 - Every project I have ever worked on starts with wireframes of the way the site will look. Now you have to look at the display, mentally break it down into the elements it represents and figure out what type of field it would be, and then think about what element would be used to input that value.

So if we want to make the process of creating content types in D8 easier, I would want to provide a way to start with the wireframe to create a rough representation of the display --drag in a formatter, give it some settings and identify what kind of data it holds (the schema). The schema would automatically get built from the settings used for the formatters and each data type could start out using whatever widget is the default widget for that type, but you could switch back to the schema tab at any time to see what your content type contains, and to the form tab to select the specific way that people would enter that information.

@KarenS I think you are fully in line with what we are thinking. The questionable thing is, for users is it "display first" or "form first" - the research we have done in the past years and the polling that quicksketch did its still a bit inconclusive. From reading your post, you want "display first"?

From my perspective, ideally we can do both. But I assume that is one nasty idea :) Creating designs for this is on the schedule of the UX-team, but we currently have our hands full with module redesign.

I was referring to the demo quicksketch had at the very end of the DrupalCon London video linked to above. He brought up a way to incorporate all these elements into the same UI using tabs that looks like a potential way to make it relatively easy to work from either end in.

I still disagree with all the people who insist that someone other than a developer who is looking at a wireframe and trying to figure out how to implement it is going to even think about forms. In most projects I've worked on they don't even have a wireframe for the form, none of the non-technical people are thinking that way at all. They have a wireframe of the way it will be displayed and they want to figure out how to display it. They eventually figure out that they need a form to collect the information that will be displayed, but that is not where they start out.