Drupal Lightning

Lightning's mission is to enable developers to create great authoring experiences and empower editorial teams.

You'll notice that Lightning appears very sparse out of the box. This is by design. We want to empower editorial teams and enable developers to jump-start their site builds. That means that a developer should never have to undo something that Lightning has done. So we started with a blank slate and justified each addition from there.

Through custom modules and configuration, Lightning aims to target four functional areas:

Media

The current version of media includes the following functionality:

• A preconfigured Text Format (Rich Text) with CKEditor WYSIWYG.
• A media button (indicated by a star -- for now) within the WYSIWYG that launches a custom media widget.
• The ability to place media into the text area and have it fully embedded as it will appear in the live entity. The following media types are currently supported:
  • Tweets
  • Instagram posts
  • Videos (YouTube and Vimeo supported out of the box)
  • Images
• Drag-and-drop image uploads
• Ability to create new media through the media library (/media/add)
• Ability to embed tweets, Instagrams, and YouTube/Vimeo videos directly into CKEditor by pasting the video URL

Layout

Lightning includes the Panelizer module, which allows you to configure the layout of any content type using a drag-and-drop interface (Panels IPE). Lightning also includes a Landing Page content type for you to create landing pages with their own one-off layouts and content.

Any content type that uses Panelizer will allow you to set up default layouts for each view mode of that content type, which you can choose from (or override on a one-off basis) for individual pieces of content.

Eight layouts are provided out of the box by Panels. You can create your own layouts (see the Layout Plugin module) or install a contributed library of layouts like Radix Layouts.

Workflow

Lightning includes tools for building organization-specific content workflows. Out of the box, Lightning gives you the ability to manage content in one of four workflow states (draft, needs review, published, and archived). You can create as many additional states as you like and define transitions between them. It's also possible to schedule content (either a single node or many at once) to be transitioned between states at a specific future date and time.

Preview (Experimental)

The Workspace Preview System (WPS) gives site builders, editors, authors, and reviews the ability to send collections of content through an editorial workflow and preview that content within the context of the current live site. WPS is a collection of contributed Drupal modules with additional configuration UX improvements that all just works out of the box.

Installing Lightning

The preferred way to install Lightning is using our Composer-based project template. It's easy!

If you don't want to use Composer, you can install Lightning the traditional way by downloading a tarball from our drupal.org project page.

You can customize your installation using lightning.extend.yml. Using this file, you can choose which Lightning features to install as well as install your own custom features.

Project Roadmap

The roadmap is subject to change, but our projected schedule is:

• QTR3/4, 2016
  • Point in time preview
  • Personalization
  • Remote replication (store workspaces on external apps)
  • Search API integration

You can also look for general enhancements along the way. Please use the Lightning issue queue for latest information and to request features or bug fixes.

Resources

You can find general best practices documentation inside the help directory of each Lightning "base" module. Integration with the Advanced Help module is planned.

Please file issues in our drupal.org issue queue.

Running Tests

These instructions assume you have used Composer to install Lightning.

Behat

$ cd MYPROJECT/docroot/profiles/lightning
$ /path/to/MYPROJECT/bin/behat

If necessary, edit behat.local.yml to match your environment. Generally you will not need to do this.

Known Issues

Media

• If you upload an image into an image field using the new image browser, you can set the image's alt text at upload time, but that text will not be replicated to the image field. This is due to a limitation of Entity Browser's API.

Preview

• This functionality relies on Multiversion, which:
  • Does not yet have a stable release
  • Modifies internal data structures
  • Leaves permanent changes in the database after being uninstalled
  • Introduces the concept of a trash bin. Deleted content is hidden, but not immediately removed from the database anymore. It needs to be deleted and then "purged" to be completely wiped from the database. However, the user interface to purge deleted content is provided by the Trash module, which is not yet ready. This makes it impossible to truly delete content from the UI. (Lightning provides a shim for this, but it only works for nodes at this time.)
• There are a few scenarios where URL aliases might produce unexpected results, including:
  • Overriding aliases generated by Pathauto
  • Aliases for any non-node entities
• Blocks on the block listing page(s) are not properly filtered by workspace under certain circumstances.
• The Workspace listing page will display a PHP warning caused by the Workspace module which is effectively harmless but may look alarming.
• There is no way yet to properly resolve conflicts between workspaces. Users can delete conflicting entities from one of the two workspaces to remove conflicts, but there is no interface yet for picking the winner and keeping both versions.