Introduction to Layout Builder

The Layout Builder module for Drupal 8 and Drupal 9 provides a layout user interface (UI), a set of flexible visual design tools that allows content creators and site administrators to customize the layout of a page via a powerful drag-and-drop UI. You can use Layout Builder to customize the layout of a single page, create a custom layout for all content of a certain type, or build landing pages.

At a high level it allows users to generate a layout — two columns with a header, for example — and then place a content type’s fields and any blocks into that layout.

Layout Builder provides an API, and layout discovery feature, that themes and other modules can use to provide new templates. It allows more consistent tooling across the entire page-building ecosystem.

In this tutorial we’ll:

Give an overview of what Drupal Layout Builder is, and its common uses
Introduce terminology and concepts related to Layout Builder

By the end of this tutorial you’ll have a better understanding of what the Drupal core Layout Builder module does and how it might help with your specific use-case.

Goal

Introduce the core Layout Builder module and related ecosystem.

Prerequisites

What is Layout Builder?

Screenshot of Layout Builder graphic UI

One of the most commonly requested features over the years has been for Drupal to provide some kind of easy-to-use page builder with a WYSIWYG sort of experience. These tools are present in other platforms, and can allow for far more flexibility without the need to write code. Such a tool can empower a whole new category of Drupal users to customize the look and feel of their Drupal applications.

To address this demand, contributed modules such as Panels and Display Suite filled the gap. But solutions using these modules were often incompatible with one another. Layout Builder (in Drupal core), provides a consistent API for modules to register a layout, and define what layouts are and can do. Moving this responsibility to core helps to unify the contributed module ecosystem rather than having lots of different silos.

Layout Builder in Drupal core consists of two modules:

Layout Discovery: An API module that defines what a layout is and handles layout registration and rendering. It also includes utilities such as automatically generating icons for the UI and more.
Layout Builder: A drag-and-drop UI for creating flexible layouts for content types built on top of the Layout Discovery API. The Layout Builder UI allows site administrators to configure a layout to use when displaying a content type, and then arrange the content types fields within the layout. Layout Builder can also place any block into a layout, which opens up all kinds of possibilities.

Layout Builder capabilities

Layout Builder module works with the fields of a specific content type, blocks, and block types.

In the simplest setup, a site builder creates a layout for a content type and applies the layout to all nodes of that content type. If they make changes to the layout, the changes apply to all existing and newly-created nodes of that type. Configuration options allow the site builder to specify a default layout for a content type, while allowing per-node customization of that layout.

admin January 5, 2022

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Introduction to Layout Builder

Goal

Prerequisites

What is Layout Builder?

Layout Builder capabilities

admin

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Goal

Prerequisites

What is Layout Builder?

Layout Builder capabilities

admin

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