Layouts and their Paths

For people coming to Backdrop from Drupal 7 (and those starting Backdrop from scratch), layouts are often one of the most difficult new concepts to grasp. One of the challenging aspects can be figuring out (or setting) which URL(s) a given layout will be applied on. In this blog post, I’ll discuss some of the technical aspects of layouts that might help users build an overall “mental model” of how layouts work.

To start, let me point out some existing useful links relevant to layouts:

#states AND/OR/XOR conditionals explained

Audience: developers creating forms programmatically

For many years now, I've been using #states in many of my pull requests that were around improving the admin user interface. I've found that hiding/showing form elements depending on various conditions, in many situations may result in a much better user experience for content editors and site builders using Backdrop.