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Pattern Lab Starter Theme

For QuickStart instructions, installation and requirements, visit the README.md at the root of the Pattern Lab Starter directory.

A starting place for using the prototyping tool, Pattern Lab, in tandem with a Drupal theme. Can be used standalone as well.

Theme Setup

Once you've ran npm install and have your theme environment installed, you'll want to rename the theme to something appropriate for your project.

Renaming the patternlab theme

We'll rename several files, and references to paths to setup our custom theme. For this purpose, my new theme will have a system name of my_custom_theme. Simply replace any instance of that with your own theme name.

  • Rename top level directory from patternlab to my_custom_theme.
  • Rename patternlab.theme to my_custom_theme.theme.
  • Rename patternlab.libraries.yml to my_custom_theme.libraries.yml.
  • Rename patternlab.info.yml to my_custom_theme.info.yml.
  • Open the newly renamed my_custom_theme.info.yml and edit the following:
    • Edit Name to reflect an appropriate friendly name for the theme, like: My Custom Theme.
    • Edit Description to reflect an appropriate description for the theme, like: My very custom theme for a very fun project....
    • Change patternlab/core under libraries to my_custom_theme/core.
  • Open gulpconfig.js and edit the following:
    • Change drupal.enabled from false to true if Drupal is installed.
    • Change drupal.themeFile from patternlab.info.yml to my_custom_theme.info.yml.
    • Optionally check the drupal.command to ensure the Drush cache rebuild command is appropriate for your environment setup.
  • Save & Close any edited files.
  • Enable your new theme at /admin/appearance by clicking Install and set as default for My Custom Theme.
  • Run npm start in the root of your my_custom_theme directory.
  • ...
  • Profit.

Using my_custom_theme

Now that we have our renamed theme installed and ready to sync between Drupal and PatternLab, we'll look at modifying an existing Molecule, then adding a new Molecule to PatternLab, and using them in Drupal.

Twig Concepts & Resources

For the majority of the items demonstrated here, the following Twig documentation will prove useful.

Altering Branding Template

Let's take a look at the core branding.twig Molecule that represents our Logo, Site Name and Site Slogan. It can be found at source/_patterns/02-molecules/branding/branding.twig. This Molecule has been built in Pattern Lab and is ready to be used by Drupal to help render this specific data.

Pattern Lab Template
<aside class="branding">
  {% if site_logo %}
    <div class="branding__logo">
      <a href="{{ url }}" title="{{ 'Home'|t }}" rel="home">
        <img src="{{ site_logo }}" alt="{{ 'Home'|t }}" />
      </a>
    </div>
  {% endif %}

  {% if site_name %}
    <h2 class="branding__name">
      <a href="{{ url }}" title="{{ 'Home'|t }}" rel="home">{{ site_name }}</a>
    </h2>
  {% endif %}

  {% if site_slogan %}
    <h6 class="branding__slogan">{{ site_slogan }}</h6>
  {% endif %}
</aside>

Now if we want to have Drupal use this Twig template to render our branding block, observe the following in templates/block--system-branding-block.html.twig:

Drupal Template
{% extends "block.html.twig" %}
{% block content %}
  {% include "@molecules/branding.twig"
    with {
      "url": path('<front>')
    }
  %}
{% endblock %}

Note the @molecules in the include statement above. This namespacing is handled by the Components module. The gulp tasks also help by writing the appropriate data to my_custom_theme.info.yml in the component-libraries portion to represent new namepsaces as we create them in Pattern Lab and translates that back to Drupal to be referenced.

The first thing we see in the Drupal template is that this block template {% extends block.html.twig %}.

By default, this theme is using Stable as its base theme in my_custom_theme.info.yml. We will look in core/themes/stable/templates/block for the default block.html.twig.

Default block.html.twig
<div{{ attributes }}>
  {{ title_prefix }}
  {% if label %}
    <h2{{ title_attributes }}>{{ label }}</h2>
  {% endif %}
  {{ title_suffix }}
  {% block content %}
    {{ content }}
  {% endblock %}
</div>

What we can see above in the default block.html.twig markup is that it has a <div> wrapper with some attributes applied, an (optional) <h2> title including a prefix and suffix, etc.

Next, we see the {% block content %} which is what we are replacing in the instance of our block--system-branding-block.html.twig above.

Essentially, the content from our custom branding block template, which is wrapped in the default block template is using a Twig include statement to include the content of our Pattern Lab template and using with to pass variables to the Pattern Lab template.

Changing the variables passed to Pattern Lab template

If we want to change the site_slogan, we could do the following in our block--system-branding-block.html.twig:

{% include "@molecules/branding.twig"
  with {
    "url": path('<front>'),
    "site_slogan": 'Your custom development environment template variable...'|t,
    "site_name": 'Overridden Site Name'|t,
  }
%}

Using preprocess to handle variables to pass to Pattern Lab template

Now, the above example showed how to just override the variables in our original Pattern Lab template with something provided by a drupal template.

You can easily go beyond this, and instead of the example of replacing the Twig variable with static text in the template, we could use an alternate variable provided by a preprocess function:

function my_custom_theme_preprocess_block__system_branding_block(&$variables) {
  $variables['custom_variable'] = [
    'url' => 'http://example.com',
    'slogan' => 'My Custom Slogan is a good one..',
    'name' => 'My Website',
  ];
}
{% include "@molecules/branding.twig"
  with {
    "url": custom_variable.url,
    "site_slogan": custom_variable.slogan|t,
    "site_name": custom_variable.name|t,
  }
%}

So by doing the above, you can start to see where a flexibility lies allowing you to assign data to a variable that will allow passing Drupal data back to our exact Pattern Lab component markup.

You can be as specific (or generic) as you want in the creation of your appropriate Atoms, Molecules and Organisms.