With Drupal 8 emerging on the horizon, we've started to delve in to our core modules, Maestro and Filedepot, beginning the process of porting them from Drupal 7 to 8. For our Drupal 8 version of Maestro, I have some immediate concerns that I would like addressed, but also some "wish list" items which I feel would bring a great deal of flexibility. A condensed road map, of sorts, for Maestro's first release on Drupal 8 would be:
1. Modularize as many components as possible. For example, we need to remove the task console from Maestro as a piece that travels along with the core Maestro module, allowing people to create their own consoles as they see fit.
2. Entities - We need entities such that the in-production processes and queue is accessible via the entity API and as a result, views. While we do have some rudimentary capabilities currently in Maestro, having a full entity governing over the data structures in Maestro is a must. I embarked on an entity project for Maestro on D7 and hope to leverage some of that for the D8 version.
3. Revamp of the template builder. The strength of Maestro is that it is a workflow engine, capable of routing tasks through your task template created with the visual workflow editor.
There is nothing like Maestro that exists in the Drupal realm - We need to keep focus on Maestro's strengths and make them stronger. Modularizing the admin template creator will allow anyone to create a Maestro template builder. However we'll be including one that uses more up-to-date technologies. Scalable vector graphics is one such avenue that would allow for a dynamically scaling/scalable canvas to create a Maestro template.
SVG based template views would allow the template to be exported as images and even as a PDF! We've embarked on determining the best route for entities (both config and content) for both Filedepot and Maestro and how they fit in and how we can leverage them in the D8 environment. So while entities are progressing, in parallel I've jumped head first in to creating an SVG based Maestro template editor.
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The screen shot above is an example of some of my work over the last few days to get an existing Maestro template represented as an SVG. Granted, it doesn't look quite as nice as the current D7 Maestro template editor... This is a prototype which will only get better over time. Currently the SVG template editor is complete with the ability to:
- drag and drop
- dynamically drawn connector lines
- colour coding and success/failure
- respects D7's Maestro template placement locations
Its a start. Stay tuned, more to come!
