Enhancing Drupal Experience Builder with Real-Time Features

Lee Rowlands describes his work on Experience Builder for Drupal at Acquia and reviews its current capabilities in version 0.5.0-alpha1. He explains how the project combines Drupal core APIs with modern front-end tools such as React, Redux, RTK-Query, Vite and Astro. Lee then proposes enhancements to deliver a richer editing experience, beginning with true multi-user editing powered by collaborative algorithms like operation transformation, CRDT or the emerging Event Graph Walker.

He outlines a plan to replace polling with real-time server events using Mercure, enabling features such as live presence indicators and component-level edit highlights. To reduce latency in preview updates, Lee suggests two approaches: running Twig in the browser via WebAssembly or converting Twig templates to JSX through his experimental twigCASTer library. Both methods aim to move rendering closer to the user and avoid round-trip delays to the Drupal server.

The post offers a clear roadmap for advancing Experience Builder but will require careful evaluation of performance, complexity and hosting requirements. Implementing collaborative editing and real-time events may demand additional infrastructure and coordination across teams. Browser-based rendering via WebAssembly or AST conversion presents promising gains but raises questions about compatibility with custom Twig extensions. Overall, the proposed features reflect current user expectations and position Experience Builder to meet enterprise-scale needs.