Countdown to The New Year - Ember Sortable

– By Melanie Sumner

This is the first in our DecEmber series–"Countdown to The New Year: 31 Days of Ember Addons". We plan to highlight a new addon each day until the new year, and we hope you'll join us for the fun!

Day 1

To kick things off, we're going to look at ember-sortable.

What It Does

The ember-sortable addon provides sortable UI primitives for Ember apps- this is super useful in the sense that teams don't have to reinvent this very common pattern every time they need it for their own applications!

Why I Like It

While the ember-sortable addon has been around for some time now, providing a consistent way to add drag and drop functionality to an Ember app, it is the most recent additions that have made this addon especially worth paying attention to. Yicheng Gong, a software engineer at LinkedIn, noticed that the addon was missing accessibility support. He took on the work via the Adopted Ember Addons org, and updated the addon to add the missing features!

The addon now provides a keyboard-only way to sort a group of items-

  • Activate the item using ENTER or SPACE
  • move the item with the ARROW keys
  • confirm the new sort order with ENTER or SPACE
  • or cancel the action with the ESC key, and the sort order will be reverted.

I really like the way this existing addon was improved to make it more accessible, and am both encouraged and excited to see accessibility have an increased focus in the Ember community.

Do you use this addon? Or one like it? We'd love to hear about Ember addons that bring you joy!