How To Prepare for Drupal 8

Experience level: 
Intermediate
Session Track: 

Business and Strategy

The purpose of this track is two-fold - one angle helps you to understand the advantages of Drupal from an organizational leadership angle and the other is to highlight the great Drupal sites and projects you're working on and to show what's possible. These sessions are business focused, and will be non-technical.

Speaker(s): 
mohan

One question that everybody in Drupal community has on their minds is how do we prepare for Drupal 8. This is a question that is common with both client managers and development shops. We will discuss few learnings we have had over the last 8 months building with D8; and the challenges that the team had to overcome. Also, we will explain our rationale of choosing to build with D8 for client project. 

This session will be useful to a variety of audience, and some sample points that will talk about during the session.

Developers :

  1. Accept the fact that developing in Drupal 8 is going to be like learning a new platform altogether.
  2. Get comfortable with Object Oriented Programming.
  3. Get to know about scaffolding. Believe us you are gonna use it time and again in Drupal 8. 

Site Admins :

  1. You can still go ahead and use Drupal 7 if you feel that you do not have enough support in Drupal 8 for modules that you frequently use.

Client Teams :

  1. Consider when would be a right time to upgrade to Drupal 8.
  2. Ask your dev team to slowly replace the existing modules with modules which have a proper upgrade path to Drupal and have similar interfaces as that of Drupal 8. This makes sure that when your sites are migrated to Drupal 8, there is not much change in user-experience.
  3. Allocate a decent budget for the migration.

May you have greater adventures with Drupal 8 ;)