RFC-9: UI Extensibility

[Ingo Schommer]

Hello everyone, 

David and myself have pulled together a new RFC-9 for UI extensibility in SilverStripe 4.

We've spent the last sprint researching approaches and creating a simple proof of concept app (not based on CMS functionality).

Extensibility of the CMS by third party devs is an important consideration for SilverStripe. It's also not the primary focus of the React community (yet), so warranted some of our own research into solutions like dependency injection.

In short, a lot of PHP subclass and SS template modifications will need to move into the frontend world if we want to make use of it efficiently, and we're trying to preserve the developer experience SilverStripe is known for.

You likely won't need to understand React and Redux in order to add fields to a page or change a date field format in SilverStripe 4. 

But if you want to write the next betterbuttons implementation these changes will impact how you think about this problem space.

It's all still early stages, but since we're planning to start concrete UI implementations fairly soon we need to lay the groundwork now.

Keen to hear everybody's feedback (on the RFC, not here on the mailinglist). Please keep React-specific feedback to the separate RFC-8.

Thanks

David (@flashbackzoo) and Ingo (@chillu)

[Cam Findlay]

Just a reminder that in a previous core committer hangout session we pretty much dropped the need for giving RFCs a number. Instead we can reference their issue # number and there is a set of tags we now use "RFC/Draft" for example. See https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/3.2/contributing/request_for_comment/#rfc-archives

This avoids confusion about the numbering or duplicate RFC numbers.

Thanks :)