Once more, we welcome you back to the Drupal Advent Calendar, to see what’s behind door number twenty-two. Today we are welcoming back an old friend, the Gin Admin Theme which was covered all the way back in Door 1 of the 2023 Drupal Advent Calendar.
So why feature it again? Well back then, Gin was something of a rebel, for use on cutting edge Drupal sites, but perhaps a bit too “punk” for respectable production sites.
But a year later Gin is becoming respectable, and as part of that, it has been selected as the default admin theme for Drupal CMS.
Drupal CMS is focused on giving the easiest to use, cleanest, and most optimised user interface to site builders, marketers, and content creators. Gin is seen as the best option for this, with its many UI enhancements, and customisation features like selectable colour and dark mode options.
So what has changed in the last year?
There have been a lot of small improvements, many of them invisible to the user, such as huge refactoring and code quality improvements. Gin now fully integrates with the core Navigation module, having previously included a draft implementation of that UI.
Another improvement is the resizeable sidebar, making it easier to customise how much screen real estate is given to sidebar elements, with the size of the sidebar remembered once set.
Gin includes many improvements to the Project Browser UI, including giving it full support for Gin features like dark mode, high contrast mode, and accent colours.
It also provides integration with the Drupal CMS installer.
One of the biggest changes is the new “sticky” action buttons. While previously Gin moved the “Save” button on content editing pages to the non-scrolling top bar, so it was always visible, it now collects actions across all pages, and moves them, placing secondary actions in a handy “more actions” drop-down. Quite how it knows which actions to move may well involve dark magic, and it sounds like it was technically challenging to implement.
And perhaps most importantly, in the last few days, Gin has achieved a stable release! After many alphas, betas, and release candidates, Gin has finally produced a stable version (actually, two of them, as both 3.0 and 4.0 branches have been marked stable). This has been a long and bumpy road - back at DrupalCon Barcelona in September it was hoped a stable release would happen that week.
This is an important milestone, and makes it a viable option for many production sites, and the fact Drupal CMS is using it should prompt many site owners to give it serious consideration.
And what’s next for Gin? One possibility is inclusion in Drupal Core. Maybe one day it could usurp Claro as the default admin theme. Personally I have mixed feelings about this prospect. Would the high standards imposed by core status slow its ability to innovate too much? Or, perhaps, achieving stability means that Gin’s innovation has reached its logical conclusion, and maybe there will be another place for trying out new things in the future.
This has been a very quick summary of the changes that have taken place. For a deeper dive into everything going on with Gin, I recommend watching Sascha’s presentation at DrupalCon Barcelona.
Whatever the future holds, I think Gin’s inclusion in Drupal CMS is a fantastic achievement, and the Starshot initiative has really been its opportunity to shine. It will hopefully help a new generation of Drupal site builders to create fantastic websites.
The Gin Admin Theme track is being led by the theme’s creator Sascha Eggenberger from Gitlab. It is co-maintained by Jürgen Haas of LakeDrops, who we already met on the Privacy tracks - it seems there is no pie he doesn’t have a finger in!
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