As the concept of “progressive decoupling” gains traction in the Drupal community, existing use cases where such implementations have proven their value can be instrumental in guiding our path forward. Weather.com is a perfect example of a scenario where a large Drupal site had to balance the needs of performance, maintainability and innovation, while providing tools that would allow both content editors and developers to move rapidly and independently.

Out of this balancing act was born what has been called at various times “Angularmodules”, the “Presentation Framework”, and now, “Progressively Decoupled Panels (PDP)”. The premise is straightforward: create a system where front-end developers can write piece of functionality in their framework of choice (for weather.com, this was Angular 1) without having to know anything about Drupal’s APIs. Next, allow those pieces of functionality to be ingested by Drupal into panels content types in such a way that content editors can simply drag and drop them into new pages and layouts.

Now, with Weather Underground being migrated onto the platform built for weather.com, this system is being generalized to allow for their use of the forthcoming Angular 2 framework instead of Angular 1. This paves the way for a truly front-end-framework agnostic system that would give the same performance and editorial benefits while allowing front end teams to use whatever framework is the hot thing of the day.

This session will explain how and why all of this came to pass, the lessons learned, and ultimately begin to lay the roadmap for building this system to be framework agnostic from the ground up as a Drupal 8 contrib module.