Miguel Camba, a Senior Engineer at DockYard and a key contributor to Beacon CMS, shares insights on developing the platform's visual editor. He discusses the seamless integration of Phoenix LiveView and JavaScript to enhance user interactions with features like drag-and-drop functionality. The conversation dives into performance optimization across different browsers and demonstrates Svelte's advantages in creating efficient, real-time updates. Miguel also elaborates on the challenges of modern content management and the importance of intuitive design for both developers and non-technical users.
Beacon CMS's visual editor effectively empowers content creators by providing a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies page building without coding.
The integration of Phoenix LiveView and JavaScript enables real-time user interaction and enhances the responsiveness of the editing experience.
Robust testing strategies, including the use of Playwright, ensure high-quality performance for the visual editor's complex interactions, minimizing issues during updates.
Deep dives
Introduction to Beacon CMS
The Beacon CMS project aims to provide a compelling content management system focused on enabling non-technical users to create and manage content easily. A crucial feature is its visual editor, designed for users to interact with the system without needing to write any code. The goal is to facilitate a drag-and-drop interface that simplifies the process of building pages while allowing for design interface adjustments. This user-friendly approach targets minimizing the technical barriers faced by users unfamiliar with programming, making it accessible for a broader audience.
Innovative Use of LiveView
Beacon CMS leverages Elixir’s LiveView to establish real-time interaction between its components, providing users instant feedback on their changes. By encoding the Higgs template as an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST), developers can manipulate the template structure visually in the editor, allowing for immediate updates reflected in the application. Several technical innovations, including a robust mechanism for persisting changes via WebSocket communication, ensure that users experience minimal latency during their editing sessions. This architecture allows for seamless integration of live updates, enhancing the overall user experience.
JavaScript Integration for Enhanced Functionality
Despite its foundation in Elixir and LiveView, the Beacon project utilizes JavaScript, particularly with frameworks like Svelte, to enable more interactive features such as drag-and-drop functionality in the visual editor. This integration addresses challenges that arise when creating highly interactive elements purely through LiveView, ensuring a smooth and responsive user experience. By adopting JavaScript for fine-grained control of the DOM, developers avoid latency issues often present in server round-trips characteristic of traditional approaches. This multifaceted technological adoption underscores the benefit of combining strengths from different programming languages for optimal performance.
Testing and Quality Assurance Strategies
To maintain high standards of quality, the Beacon project implements robust testing strategies, utilizing tools from both the JavaScript and Elixir ecosystems. With a focus on UI testing, they have adopted Playwright, which allows them to create end-to-end test scenarios that mimic real user interactions with the application. Additionally, the integration of JavaScript testing capabilities simplifies the process of building reliable automated tests to ensure that complex interactions, like drag-and-drop functionalities, perform as expected. This approach emphasizes thorough testing at all levels while enabling rapid iteration as new features are developed.
Future Development Directions and User Experience
Future enhancements for Beacon CMS will focus on improving the visual editor’s user interface to make it more intuitive and cohesive, aligning with user expectations derived from familiar software applications. The development will leverage internal tools and components from the existing library, allowing for rapid feature deployment while maintaining quality. Enhancements such as style customization, responsive design adjustments, and user-friendly controls are all set to create a more familiar editing experience for users. This continuous evolution demonstrates a commitment to enhancing usability and ensuring that the CMS remains functional and appealing for a diverse user base.
In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I'm joined by Miguel Camba, a Senior Engineer at DockYard and key contributor to Beacon CMS. Miguel dives deep into the development of Beacon's visual editor, a powerful feature that bridges the gap between developers and content creators. We explore how the team leveraged Phoenix LiveView and JavaScript to build an intuitive, real-time editing experience while maintaining Beacon's commitment to performance. Miguel shares fascinating technical insights about implementing drag-and-drop functionality, handling real-time previews, and managing state across complex visual editing operations. Our conversation covers the challenges of building a modern page builder in Elixir, the architectural decisions that shaped the editor's design, and how it fits into Beacon's vision of making content management more accessible. This episode provides valuable perspectives for developers interested in building sophisticated browser-based tools with Phoenix LiveView and the future of visual editing in the Elixir ecosystem.