May 3, 2016

Drupal 8 was officially launched in November, 2015. We have been fortunate to test Drupal 8 during its early development and as of today, have launched two Drupal 8 websites.  This article will serve as our Drupal 8 “wiki” where we share lessons learned with Drupal 8.

What we like:

  • Improved authoring (content editing) experience.  The admin is responsive to accomodate multi-device authoring.  In addition, in-text editing, meaning you can edit the text from its visual layer, as opposed to the admin view, is available.   
  • Ease of integration with 3rd party services, and ease of theming due to the twig templating engine. 
  • Workflow automation.  Site configurations can be exported and imported easily, as well as committed into version control. This improves the workflow and QA process of releasing new features from a development environment to a production environment.
  • Caching innovation.  Drupal 8 is meant for performance.  Earlier versions of Drupal (6 or 7) came with caching by default out of the box.  Drupal 8 takes it to the next level by improving the process of clearing the cache, and deciding which elements should be cached or not.  This will give your visitors a more consistent experience throughout the day, and, as Dries says, will make Drupal 8 Fly.

 

What to consider:

  • Not all modules that are available for Drupal 7 are available for 8.  This is understandable as both versions of Drupal, 7 and 8, are supported by the community and Drupal 8 is in its infancy.  
  • Keep up with releases.  A bug that you encounter may very well be fixed in the next release.
  • It is fair to assume that tasks will take slightly longer today, than the same task will take in the near future.  The short term trade-off of spending more time now is minimized from the benefits and long term future proofing of Drupal 8.
  • With that said, consider what you can give back to Drupal with your Drupal 8 project.  On our end, we are working on marketing automation modules to contribute as community modules.

 

We will continue to update this post as we progress with Drupal 8. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions and are curious if Drupal 8 is right for you.