JavaScript-Driven Drupal Admin

More and more organizations are using JavaScript frameworks to create visitor-facing experiences with Drupal as a backend, but Drupal's own administration interface has not yet embraced a modern JavaScript framework. Understandably, there is high demand for Drupal to provide a cutting-edge experience for its own users: the site's content creators and administrators.

Good news, though, from Dries Buytaert, the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform, and co-founder and chief technology officer of Acquia: There's been real progress towards creating a JavaScript-driven Drupal Administration Interface.

As Dries reports on his blog, at DrupalCon Vienna, it was decided to start work on an alternative Drupal administrative UI using React.

Sally Young, one of the initiative coordinators, recently posted an update on the progress since DrupalCon Vienna.

Read this post to get an overview of some of the most important next steps, which are, btw:

1. Stabilize the JSON API module
2. Improve our JavaScript testing infrastructure
3. Create designs for a React-based administration UI
4. Allow contributed modules to use React or Twig
5. Implement missing web service APIs
6. Make the React UI extensible and configurable

It all adds up to more progress towards moving Drupal to an increasingly API-first and JavaScript-centric world.

Comments? Post them over on Dries' blog, to keep all the discussion together.