Our Drupal 8 Upgrade

Fletch — Fri, 18 Nov 2016 21:23:37 +0000

Recently we relaunched our website using Drupal 8. It was migrated from the original version 7 site. Overall we rank the experience overwhelmingly positive.

Migrate From Drupal 7

We only hit one hitch when following the instructions. The development setup did not have all the uploaded image files from the original site. This resulted in perplexing log messages. After downloading the image files, the migration worked without issue.

Theming: Zen to Classy

Past experience lead us to appreciate Zen. It was a clean solution that used minimal HTML and CSS to get a website started. Creating a theme with Zen was a blank slate. The Drupal 8 version seems to be more complex and is not well documented. We had limited success using the supplied example.

Switching to the built-in Classy made things simpler. It gave us a more familiar blank slate to build our own styles and templates.

Working with Twig is a pleasure. It's a huge improvement over the old mix of HTML and PHP. The Twig debugging facility is a huge improvement in Drupal 8. It shows which template generated something in HTML comments. Tracking that information down in Drupal 7 was often difficult.

Configuration

Configuration files are a major improvement. In the past, we limited ourselves to modules that supported Features. This is no longer a concern. Configuration is handled in the same publishing system as our code.

Content Authoring

The new in-place quick edit feature is very good.

The arrangement of the content editing page is nice. It gives more visual weight to the content editing facilities and less weight to infrequently used controls such as URL paths and meta tags. This helps authors focus on what's important.

Workflow has improved for developers and site builders. The same is not true for content authors. There is no support for staging content before publication. This is a feature we would love to offer to clients.

Development

The plug-in system is nice. The bigger modules of Drupal 7 were organizing things into plug-ins already, making it a natural progression. The namespace system results in highly organized code.

Pre-processing items before theming and altering forms work the same as Drupal 7. We were therefore able to get started quickly.

Conclusion

Drupal 8 is a nice platform with tons of potential. We look forward to building customer sites using this technology.

Hire us to build your site, request a quote today.

Fletch Fri, 11/18/2016 - 13:23

Drupal

Drupal 8

Diving into Drupal 8

Laura — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 20:56:03 +0000

Diving into Drupal 8

We monkeys are re-designing our site and using Drupal 8 for the first time! We've been watching the progress and are excited to test it out. Dave will be writing about the technical side; documenting his challenges and successes. He's been working with Drupal since 2007 and version 4.7. Personally, I started using it actively in November of 2008 but initially I was only adding content in the form of galleries and blog posts to my art website.

Now I'm considerably more involved in the backend: installing and configuring modules; SEO optimization; and social media integration.

Since I'm not sure what we'll be encountering along the way, I'll share with you some of the functionality I'm curious about:

WYSIWYG text editors. Dave likes to write his blogs in code, but for me and most of our clients, a functional, user friendly, customizable WYSIWYG editor is critical.
Non-text content. How will Drupal 8 work for different content types: embedded videos, GIFs, slideshows, inserted images. What mobile challenges might we encounter with the different file types?
Any new ways to ensure content is easily shareable and discoverable? Specifically how social network cards, metatags, RSS feeds, and XML site maps are currently the backbone of that structure.
eCommerce solutions. We have three client sites with online shops; how will Drupal 8 integrate with external payment systems, SSL certificates, and how easy will it be to migrate over.

Dave set up our dev environment yesterday, and I must say that my initial reaction is positive! In regards to the general backend, it's clean and the placement of menus is familiar. I was disappointed that drop down menus were still not part of the core and found Admin Toolbar to add that functionality. For our Drupal 7 sites, we are using Adminimal, but it did not play well with the dropdown menu, so other than that we're using the basic back end.

The most impressive thing for me is the "Quick Edit" function which allows users to edit directly on the view screen; woohoo, inline editing!. From the other side of the office, Dave is grumbling a bit as the first content migration is missing some of our data.

Some other questions we hope to answer during our initial prodding:

How difficult will it be to migrate custom built tools?
How much of our existing schema and content can be easily migrated?
How difficult will it be to import or recreate Features from Drupal 7?
Will user permissions be similar to Drupal 7 or will we have to rebuild/rework the permissions grids?

Stay tuned for our adventures learning Drupal 8!

Laura Wed, 02/17/2016 - 12:56

Drupal 8

Re-design

Announcement