
Drupal 8.0.0 released - randomname2
https://www.drupal.org/8
======
donutdan4114
I've migrated two simple modules to Drupal 8, and created one specifically for
D8. I can tell you that D8 is a much better setup on the programming side. D8
is finally following modern programming paradigms, such as dependency
injection, twig templating, OOP that makes sense, composer support, PSR-4,
PHP7 support, and more.

Can't wait to start building much larger sites with D8 and when there's more
contributed content for it.

------
Albright
Developer of Pathologic [1] here. Code-wise, D8 is really a whole new paradigm
for the system, so if you've given Drupal a look in the past and rolled your
eyes at the PHP 4-ness of it all, I really encourage you to give it another
look with fresh eyes in the future.

In terms of user-facing features, I think the greatly improved support for
multilingual sites is the most exciting new feature (especially as just this
week I've been encountering headaches related to i18n implementation on a D7
site… argh).

1:
[https://www.drupal.org/project/pathologic](https://www.drupal.org/project/pathologic)

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rlander
Kudos for the reboot. I haven't touched Drupal in maybe 7 years, but I gather
it must be orders of magnitude easier now to develop a site with modern
software engineering tools than it was then.

However, this reasoning feels wrong:

 _If we were to ignore these market forces, Drupal would be caught flat-footed
and quickly become irrelevant._

Wordpress is still the same big ball of mud it was 10 years ago and it powers
1/4 of the internet.

~~~
donutdan4114
I would argue that Drupal's target is much different than Wordpress'. Yes,
Drupal has a tiny bit of focus on small sites, but Drupal can't contend with
Wordpress, not even close. Wordpress is much faster to setup and get a nice
looking site up and running.

Where WP falls short is in the enterprise market, and this is where Drupal's
ideal customer is. Drupal powers Tesla, Whitehouse.gov, Weather.com,
Economist, NY.gov, and other major sites. So for Drupal to remain relevant to
these types of clients it has had to play catchup. D7 changed a lot from it's
initial release, and a lot of contrib modules helped make it a decent
enterprise-level solution. But D8 is a whole new beast that really sets the
bar pretty high. You can literally build anything in Drupal, and with it's new
focus on having "headless" RESTful services, it can be used to power your
entire content strategy (pushing content to apps, other sites, etc).

~~~
zdw
> Wordpress is much faster to setup and get a nice looking site up and
> running.

I would argue that this is faster than most Wordpress setups:

    
    
        drush dl drupal
        drush si drupal ...
        drush en "name of theme"
    

Wordpress is easier to set up only for the "I still use tools from a decade or
two ago" crowd.

~~~
anon6_
Both have an easy CLI setup:

[http://wp-cli.org/](http://wp-cli.org/)

There are solutions catering to SAAS/application-specific hosting for both.
Wordpress.com / Drupal Gardens as well as containers and configurations
scripts you can use to get a jump start.

Both have similar philosophies in the sense you can login and immediately
start switching on modules/extensions you want to use. Both are CMS.

~~~
lucideer
How much experience do you have using wp-cli? Drupal/drush are a long long way
off perfect but comparing drush to wp-cli is apples and oranges.

wp-cli is extremely brittle even for very simple download+install, produces
very poor defaults in terms of file/directory permissions and general on-
filesystem stuff, and this is before you get into things like drush's many
other functions for general admin or its extensibility.

That is not a criticism of wp-cli's developers though, as about 99.9% of its
limitations are down to the Wordpress core team's complete disinterest in
accommodating its functionality well or in providing a codebase that fits into
a modern deployment setup in any reliable, well-considered way.

The work done on wp-cli is really commendable: it seems to be battling against
quite a tide.

------
samuell
Drupal lead, Dries, also wrote a read-worthy post on the release:

[http://buytaert.net/drupal-8-0-0-released](http://buytaert.net/drupal-8-0-0-released)

------
JohnTHaller
As the operator of one of the larger Drupal-powered sites, I'm looking forward
to playing with some of the news features and functionality (first on my
personal site). Granted, I still dread making the transition from D7 to D8 for
my production site with 200k registered users, 53k nodes, and 3m unique
monthly visitors.

~~~
anon6_
Care to link your site?

Do you have any blog posts on how you manage to scale with drupal? Have you
considered alternative solutions?

~~~
JohnTHaller
As mentioned in someone else's post, it is PortableApps.com. I left it off as
I didn't want to be self promotional in the reference. Mine is far from the
largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com and The Onion have done
more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple servers and the like.
Personally, for PortableApps.com, I've used Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation [1]
and LABjs [2] to help quite a bit in terms of caching along with offloading
images and static scripts to a CDN (MaxCDN in our case). Moving the MySQL data
from a standard server-based instance to Rackspace's Cloud Database instance
and the Drupal install from a dedicated server to a cloud server that can be
up/downgraded helped as well. All while keeping costs to about the same as the
old single dedicated server.

1:
[https://www.drupal.org/project/advagg](https://www.drupal.org/project/advagg)
2:
[https://www.drupal.org/project/labjs](https://www.drupal.org/project/labjs)

~~~
Alupis
> Mine is far from the largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com
> and The Onion have done more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple
> servers and the like

Don't forget [https://www.whitehouse.gov](https://www.whitehouse.gov) \- it's
a Drupal 7 site, and I imagine it gets a fair amount of traffic.

~~~
JohnTHaller
The traffic estimation sites online peg whitehouse.gov at around 3m monthly
visitors as well.

------
audessuscest
Very interesting incoming developpement :
[https://www.drupal.org/project/big_pipe](https://www.drupal.org/project/big_pipe)

------
spdionis
I like that people are constructively discussing about Drupal without bashing
PHP. I'm pretty surprised about it. Good luck to the Drupal project. Being a
symfony developer myself I know that it's a great framework and Drupal surely
benefited a lot from the integration.

------
cdnsteve
I'm skeptical about investing anymore time into Drupal after using 7
extensively for the past few years. Any work I've done was mainly custom
module development, soap, rest apis, aws integrations, ecommerce, etc. Pretty
app heavy stuff. It's not well suited for these tasks but it can do them if
you get creative. This, of course, has great overhead and complexity.

I'm going to look closely at other options. It seems at this level that Drupal
has been outgrown and that once you hit that point, for me, it feels like
pressing the reset button and starting over. I'm bummed it has a growth
ceiling.

I also feel strongly that the productivity level is deceiving. You race out of
the gate with clicky this and module that, to later find working with a custom
data model to be extremely painful or that you can only do things via
interface and not in code. Unit testing, at least in 7 is non existent. Short
term gains and long term pains. It does not feel like it was ever designed
with developer speed and procutivity in focus.

So while I'm curious to hear of the new release I also just feel you can't
teach an old dog new tricks. Part of this is the.community it has built for
itself. Time will tell. I have a feeling D8 is between a rock and a hard
place. At some point a framework is just way better. Tool for the job I guess.

~~~
mercer
I agree. While there are probably a bunch of use-cases where Drupal is a good
solution, I find that it doesn't hit any 'sweet spot' that I care about.

For very simple sites I'm inclined to use a static site generator.

For relatively simple sites that need a CMS, I use Wordpress (much as I
dislike it). The clients are often familiar with it, and it _is_ pretty easy
to set things up. And if I'm going the Wordpress route, I might as well take
advantage of the high amount of plugins and the complete (and often cheap)
themes that target specific industries.

For anything more complicated, I used to be in the Drupal camp, but now I opt
for a framework approach. Rails, Express, or something like that. With every
single site I've built in Drupal I _always_ ran into the problem that the time
spent on 'clicky this and module that' eventually outgrew the initial speed
advantage, and I would have been better off doing these things in code in a
environment optimized for this approach ('true' frameworks).

I think it's analogous to how many of my clients insist on using Wordpress and
paying more for that instead of a static site. They would've been better off
with a static site that I update for a small fee, or perhaps even a small
lesson in FTP-ing and editing a file, but they wanted the 'option' of logging
in and changing stuff. But many of them never do.

Similarly, the choice of Drupal sometimes seems to be primarily project
managers who want the 'option' of making complex changes through the admin
interface, just so they have the option. Never mind that the complexity tends
to be high enough that you need a programmer anyways to pull it off, so you
might as well just go the framework way.

------
rybosome
One of the most challenging projects I've worked on was building a Drupal 7
site. I was fresh out of college and had absolutely no Drupal experience. In
retrospect, I am confident that there were likely easier ways to do many of
the things which I wanted, but at the time everything felt like an uphill
battle.

The biggest challenge was the UI; I had to build something against mocks from
photoshop, meaning it had to be pixel-perfect and identical to what the client
had agreed to. Most contrib modules didn't have a way to easily customize the
output (as far as I could tell), so I either had to modify the code of the
module to produce exactly what I needed or just write the functionality myself
(typically choosing the latter). Had I been working with a Drupal guru there
may have been a way to avoid this, but who knows? It seems other commenters
have mentioned needing to customize the modules themselves.

This was a very poor experience for me. D8 looks like a large improvement, but
I was so thoroughly burned by the lack of clarity and community support that I
doubt I will touch Drupal again.

~~~
Albright
Aside from the inexperience issue (D7 and later really do give you the power
to override theming on just about anything), you should never promise a client
that a web design will replicate a mock-up with pixel perfection. It's
impossible; there's just too much that's out of your control. A web design
mock-up is more of a guideline that can be followed pretty closely, but never
perfectly replicated.

------
thibaut_barrere
To people using Drupal in production: can you share what you consider to be
the sweet spot for using Drupal? Also, are you mostly using existing
components, or leaning more toward custom development?

~~~
donutdan4114
I've worked on many Drupal sites, and I would say the sweet spot is a client
who is going to budget $10k+. Basically, under $10k budget means you should be
looking at simpler, pre-baked solutions, like Wordpress, Squarespace, Shopify,
Wix, static HTML, etc.. I've worked on Drupal projects from $25-250k+, and it
can handle pretty much everything (sometimes requiring a lot of TLC tho).

There are so many contributed modules that can help build things out, but I
_always_ need some type of customizations requiring (usually a few) custom
modules per project. It all depends... I did one project that had dozens of
crazy features that we broke out into 70+ custom modules...

But yea, I would say the sweet spot is a customer who needs a pretty large
site with a lot of _functionality_. My 2 cents anyway.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
This is some very useful insight, thanks! I've been asking this since at
times, fully custom development (I ship Rails apps mostly, since 2005) is not
the way to go, so I'm looking for other options where using modules (either
custom or purchased) could help.

~~~
ohthehugemanate
I would suggest you consider drupal as a basis for your fully custom sites.
You start out of the box with a well supported, standards based system for the
basics: user management/authentication, data modeling/storage/query, routing,
path handling, HTML templating etc etc. It has a huge ecosystem of modules,
also effectively out of the box, for third party integrations and all sorts of
esoteric requirements. So you start writing your custom code on an established
base with a strong API for modification and integration, which means less
custom code to support.

In a Drupal custom module you can do or change literally anything, and you can
write whatever architecture you like for your individual component. You just
have to integrate with the Symfony2 router and dependency injection container.
Pretty cool stuff.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Great - thanks everyone for your replies!

This looks interesting indeed.

May I ask what is your preferred way to learn Drupal for a total newcomer,
albeit a truly seasoned developer?

~~~
Albright
Unfortunately, the book I usually point people to [1] when they ask a question
like that is not yet updated for Drupal 8. Frankly, we're probably going to be
in that awkward state where supply for learning resources for D8 is greatly
overwhelmed by demand for a little while at least. But it's OSS; if all else
fails, you can trace the source code, assuming you've got the PHP chops.

1: [http://www.drupalbook.com](http://www.drupalbook.com)

------
stevejburge
If you're interested in ramping up quickly with Drupal 8, there's a completely
free Drupal 8 class available on YouTube:
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtaXuX0nEZk9MKY_ClWcP...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtaXuX0nEZk9MKY_ClWcPkGtOEGyLTyCO)

There's over 60 videos. It's sponsored by
[http://Acquia.com](http://Acquia.com) (the biggest fish in the Drupal pond)
and created by [http://OSTraining.com](http://OSTraining.com), who are one of
the top sources for Drupal videos.

~~~
x5n1
From what I can see, very little UI differences between D7 and D8, most D7 and
D6 developers should be right at home with D8.

~~~
ekaln
Partially true.

Yes, there's definitely very few UI changes between D7 and D8 ... so
sitebuilders should feel right at home.

However, everything has changed in the codebase, so developers have a lot of
learning to do.

------
unixhero
Drupal 6 was an exciting time for them. I wonder if they manage to rewrite all
those plugins for the Drupal 8 release. I certainly hope so.

It's been in the making a long long time. I guess I will have to give this a
spin.

~~~
donutdan4114
Pretty much everything under the hood has been rewritten. It is a very
different CMS than D6/7 was. Whether or not all those changes are for the
better, is up to you to decide.

------
SwellJoe
I have very mixed feelings about Drupal. On one hand, it does have a lot of
functionality available in third party modules; but the quality and
completeness of them varies _wildly_ , and most require custom code in order
to be useful.

Another issue is maintenance. I don't think I've ever met a well-maintained
contrib module; even ones that seem to be actively maintained aren't what I
would call "well" maintained...reported bugs don't get fixed, patches don't
get accepted or commented on (I have a half dozen bugfix patches spread across
three or four projects, including one for something in core, that have gotten
no response, some for months). While Drupal doesn't suffer from the crass
commercialization that has befallen much of the WordPress ecosystem, it seems
only companies paying for development get any sort of response. I don't have a
problem with developers prioritizing paying customers (I do it with my own
Open Source software, as well); but, when someone sends a patch that fixes a
bug, at _least_ comment on why you don't want to integrate it or give some
guidance on what would make it acceptable for integration. I am beginning to
feel like submitting a ticket to the Drupal issue tracker, even with a patch
to fix the problem I'm reporting, is a waste of my time. If it were one
project or module, this wouldn't be such a big deal; individuals get busy.
But, I can't think of any Drupal module or project that I've ever had a good
experience reporting issues on. And, if I didn't know that development is
still ongoing, and that many new sites are being developed with Drupal, I
would assume this extraordinarily poor level of interaction in the tracker was
indicative of the impending death of the project.

There is also an academic love of complexity and abstraction in Drupal, almost
to the point of absurdity, at times. Every new release introduces vast swaths
of new terminology (often used in ways slightly unlike the rest of the
industry use the term). Entities, nodes, rules, entity bundles, content types,
views, entity references, delta, features, fields, hook, machine name,
taxonomy, etc. About half of these do not mean what I would have guessed or
are used in subtly different ways from what I would have guessed. And, it's
impossible for a casual Drupal developer to stay on top of this stuff; it
moves so rapidly, and is so poorly documented, one has to read code. And,
there's a _lot_ of code. Somehow, despite all the abstraction, most modules
include huge swaths of code, and aren't particularly re-usable. Even very
simple functionality seems to require pages of code. It's often more of a pain
in the ass to make the re-usable components work in some way that the
developers didn't think of than it is to implement from scratch. Partly this
is my own shallow knowledge of Drupal, but I see experts building out entirely
new modules to address very similar use cases to other modules they've made,
so I'm not alone. Somehow, despite WordPress' much uglier code base, I'm
generally able to implement stuff more rapidly than in Drupal; and many things
that seem really locked down and hard to change in Drupal seem easy in
WordPress.

The upgrade path is literally disastrous for non-core modules. One literally
can't get from point A (a Drupal 6 site) to point B (a Drupal 7 site) without
writing a lot of migration code, unless you're only using the most basic of
core functionality. I'm months into a migration from D6 to D7. The new(-ish)
Migrate module requires writing code, sometimes significant amounts of it, and
is extremely poorly documented (and uses a bunch of its own jargon in
confusing ways; the number of contexts in which the word "migration" is used
for different purposes makes my head explode), and in-place upgrades don't
exist for a large number of modules, including pretty important ones (like
Project Issue, the module used by Drupal.org for its own issue tracker...it
has no working upgrade path, at all).

I see the benefits that Drupal 8 brings. And, having worked with Drupal 7 for
a few months now during this migration, I see that the direction is a positive
one. But, I find myself being angry a lot whenever I work with it, because
there's so much forward momentum (everything changes! all the time!) but
nobody seems to give a shit about bugs, major usability problems, or providing
a reasonable upgrade path. Really basic stuff that ought to go without saying,
really doesn't in Drupal.

So, it's a real love/hate relationship. Which is true of every CMS I've ever
used (and I've used a lot). I have decided to stick with Drupal through at
least one more iteration and will launch our Drupal 7 site in a few days (if
I'm lucky), but I don't know if I'll ever migrate to Drupal 8.

~~~
jlahijani
May I suggest taking a strong look at ProcessWire? You only need to deal with
fields, templates and pages and all content is in a simple to understand tree
hierarchy. I switched to it from WordPress 2.5 years ago and haven't looked
back. Great developer community as well.

~~~
SwellJoe
While it looks nice, it isn't in the category of software I would use. I don't
need a CMS, per se.

I use Drupal for commerce with subscriptions, support ticket tracking, forums,
software license management, and, only peripherally, for content management.
So, it's not the "CMS" part of Drupal that matters to me. I need an ecosystem
that contains a bunch of functionality that operates reasonably well together.
Drupal, for all its warts, does actually have most of the code I need already
written. While it's taken me months to migrate to Drupal 7, it would have
taken years to implement all of the functionality I need from scratch (our
website is not our core competency or what we're selling, it's a tool for
supporting our actual products, so I don't have a team...it's just me).

------
isoos
Is it possible to create a multiple-level (nested) multisite setup with
Drupal?

I am looking for to have a separate site for: example.com/, example.com/a,
example.com/b, example.com/a/123, example.com/a/234?

If not drupal, is there an alternative (wordpress plugin?) to achieve the
same?

~~~
jackbravo
This is probably easier to maintain (code wise) using different root folders,
but configuring the http output folder within apache or nginx configuration.

~~~
ksenzee
Yes. Drupal itself is moving away from multisite and toward this kind of
setup. Disk space is cheap now. Unless you're talking about literally
thousands of sites, and you have the Drupal expertise on your team to manage
that kind of setup, use separate root folders.

------
freshyill
I work with Drupal 7, and I don't love it. I'm very much looking forward to
Drupal 8. The powerful built-in support for building restful looks great.

