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By Aceman on
Hello everybody! I use Drupal since version 4 for a lot of my customers. With Drupal 7 I can do almost everything, handle big data on thousands of nodes and so on.
I have to start a new big project and decided to have a look at Drupal 8. Now the point is: should I use D8 in this new project? After a week of tests I cannot use "rules" at their best but I've seen the newly "Action" module. I can't find a lot of "familiar" things that I've used to use in Drupal 7, but D8 development is still growing and a lot of modules are becoming available day by day.
D8 is absolutely better in terms of speed and security and it supports PHP 5.6 (and 7..) , it's also more easy to update and translate. But with D7 I can do everything I need in less time (yes... because I know it better). Just a quick example: with D8 I'm still unable to create a custom field with checkboxes choice and I'm feeling very stupid for that :)
What's your point of view guys? Spend some days in studying D8 or use D7 at it's best for this project (and for almost 4 or 5 years of its duration)? Thanbks in advance for any suggestion.
Ezio
Comments
Yeah, you're going to need to
Yeah, you're going to need to Google a bunch to find the "right" answer for you, but, in general my opinion is it comes down to what long term costs your customers are willing to bear:
For D7 or the D7 fork Backdrop ( https://backdropcms.org/ )
Fairly cheap for small to medium sized businesses.
For D8
Fairly expensive for small to medium sized businesses.
I specifically don’t include costs for large businesses as they almost always use someone like Acquia or Pantheon, and large businesses are like dealing with governments, the bureaucracy load would necessitate about doubling my rates.
Add to that: For the same site functionality on the same hardware, D8 about doubles the page generation time, which again you can Google, but it’s easy to see why this is, from the gross number of files each version installs for core.
It does seem to boil down to when open source projects go object-oriented they shut out about 80% of the coder base that could have continued working on the project, and as a result become more expensive for the end user.
My 2 cents,
Michael
Drupal Hosting
NIH Cancer Study: Supplemention with both vitamins and fenbendazole exhibited significant (P = 0.009) inhibition of tumor growth.
Absolutely clear! ;) My
Absolutely clear! ;) My google is actually on fire and I'm thinking a lot on that choice. D7 is currently winning this battle but I've decided to "study" for another week at least.
=-=
boolean field for checkboxes in D8.
As I said, I started to feel
As I said, I started to feel stupid. Now, I feel really stupid!! :) Thanks man.
Hello There,
Hello There,
I have been exploring D8 and D7 from some time and found that there are lot of important modules which was not part of core has been moved to core in D8 hence it is much more rich in terms of features. Also, it is much faster and advance in terms of features. You will also have ease of upgrading to newer version of drupal.
We strive not to make people feel stupid :)
If you are looking for functionality + features + popular modules added into core, in order to speed up your setup time (no need to download and install/configure additional modules to get things done), then do take Backdrop CMS for a spin! :)
It is as familiar as D7, so almost nothing new to learn, but so much more less annoying to work with. It includes most of the functionality of D8 that appeals to small business owners and SMB-targeted digital agencies. It is constantly being improved, with new features added every 4 months). It is much faster (considering that we have added sooo many additional features), and does not require expensive hosting plans, nor does it require installing/learning/troubleshooting things like composer/symfony etc. on your local dev environment. Plus:
Popular modules already baked into core (with more to come): https://backdrop-ops.github.io/slides/intro-mini.html#/19 ...Admin Menu/Views/VBO/Ctools/Token/Pathauto/jQuery Update/Date/Link/Entity API/File Entity/CKEditor/more. Not just randomly thrown in ...properly integrated with TLC, and with many UI improvements to make them work, look, and feel like a single thing!
Admin UX improved by making the language and terminology used less technical, placing things where people expect to find them, and fixing the oh so many WTFs that have been tormenting D7 users for so long. There are many more to fix yet, but we are working on it :) ...issues with "[UX]" tag: 550 open / 344 closed
Intuitive layout/block system in core (think Panels + Display Suite ...but so much easier and intuitive) ...we had that in Backdrop core 1.0.0 ...that is since 2015!!
Configuration Management in core if that is your thing (think Features, ...but more like D8 config. We just use .json files instead of .yml)
Most simple D7 contrib modules should work out of the box with Backdrop. Some others might require a tiny bit of work, but most of the popular ones have already been ported for you: https://backdropcms.org/modules (~350 with more being ported!) ...did I mention that you can install them without ever having to leave the admin interface? ...oh yeah, we have this thing called Project Browser/Installer in core (think app store, but for modules/themes ...minus the price tag).
All that made to work and tested with php7!
Wondering what major is down the pipe? ...automatic (security) updates!! ...again, if that is your thing :)
In general, it is a polished version of D7 on steroids + love + community + popular D7 contrib modules + D8 popular features - D8 expensive requirements.
...plus we strive not to make people (site builders and content authors) feel stupid :)
Big commitment
Yea it is definitely a big commitment to stick with something. Luckily we have it installed by another company for us here and we're forced to select the version. We're probably staying with it for that long as well.
Good thing I get to ignore the differences and just learn one perhaps.