Miro Dietiker is president of Drupal Events (Switzerland) and serial entrepreneur including being founder of the Swiss Drupal expert consulting company MD Systems. He initiated and architected huge contrib frameworks like Translation Management Tool, Shared Content, Past, Simplenews and maintains many contrib modules mostly together with his business partner Sascha Grossenbacher (Berdir). In his free time he enjoys being outdoors with his 8 months old daughter and beloved wife.
Just two months ago, we started reviewing the news from Drupal 8 core in the Swiss Drupal User Group (DUG). We found that developers are facing a huge paradigm shift. Developers new to the Drupal ecosystem with strong OO skills will get a smoother start with Drupal 8, but Drupal 7 or 6 developers must properly rethink and break away from the past procedural patterns. The system has become more consistent, mature, convincing and ready to easily overcome previous limits.
Many subsystems in Drupal are already very stable and one can build on it. Other elements need to be touched up or even completely revised. A handful of Drupal core professionals are well informed about the state, something which is difficult to assess from outside.
The beta release of Drupal 8 is, by the time of this writing, four weeks overdue. This release should confirm Drupal 8's stability and therefore be the "reference"-release for the start of development of our many additional modules. This situation is currently deceptive: An important reason for the delay is the incomplete upgrade path, BUT this should not lead to further delays starting with contrib development.
Review of Drupal 7 release
After the release of Drupal 7 on 5 January 2011, almost six months passed before the Views module was released and numerous improvements were implemented, allowing regular site builders to work with the system as usual. Larger projects, however, had to wait even longer. Many contrib modules still did not really start with a Drupal 7 version, so another 6 months waiting time was required to make the bigger building blocks ready for complex projects in production.
Drupal 7 missed a great chance because the contrib modules were not ready and we gambled away a huge advantage.
What about Drupal 8?
We are now in a good position to make sure this history does not repeat itself. The most important modules such as Views are now in Core and Drupal itself is so flexible that many auxiliary modules are no longer necessary.
Now it is important to ensure that the most important add-on modules are available by release date for the end user.
Drupal 8 expertise must be made available in an appropriate form for the rest of the community. Module maintainers need to rally now and upgrade their modules now to provide the best possible support for Drupal 8. Together, we can activate, once again, a development power in the Drupal ecosystem. Drupal core itself will benefit since the modules will validate the core patterns simultaneously and new people will work on solutions.
First Drupal 8 User Group Meetings
The first Drupal user groups started to provide access to Drupal 8 know-how to the community.
MD Systems, on 9 August 2013, together with the Swiss association Drupal Events initiated the first Swiss Drupal 8 Module sprint. The enthusiasm was huge: 32 participants registered and more participated. There were many familiar faces. Even new people found their way to us - and many participants joined the Sprint remotely. Interest in the subject is vast and the sprint delivered work on more than 10 modules. The event was highly productive and very inspiring.
Global Call for Drupal Contrib 8 sprints
We now go a step further and request all user groups to hold specific sprints for Drupal 8 Contrib development. This is the most efficient way to learn about the new platform. Participants can start with their know-how from Drupal 7 and investigate how to implement the same with Drupal 8. Developers may port modules, site builder and project manager can create manuals, documentation and do testing. Every new resource created will help others as a reference.
All the events and other information is coordinated at d8cx.org, where a collection of educational examples will be developed.
Let’s get Drupal 8 ready. Happy Sprinting for Drupal 8!
Comments
Part of what makes Miro cool, in addition to this Drupal stuff he does on the side, is that he plays Canvas Rider. Oh yeah! ; )
Thank you to everyone who's already started porting contrib modules, providing resources on how to do that, and organizing sprints to do it. This process has already led to core issues being discovered and filed, and it's very important for this to be happening while we still have the flexibility to fix them. As stated in this post, Drupal 8 is a huge paradigm shift from Drupal 7, and there might be things contrib modules rely on in Drupal 7 that aren't available or working correctly in Drupal 8, and the sooner we discover that, the more likely it is we can fix it.
However, as a core developer, I disagree with the statement in the post that:
The reality is that although July 1 marked the beginning of API freeze, and therefore, many normal priority issues are being postponed to Drupal 9, we still have a lot of major and critical priority issues that require API changes. You can follow this list of ones already approved by the core maintainers, and more will be added to this list as they are discovered.
So, please don't port your modules with the expectation that if you do so now, you won't have any work to do when we get closer to release. We haven't reached that level of stability yet. But, please do take advantage of where we are in the development process, and start porting your modules in order to learn the new system and help us find remaining issues.
effulgentsia, thank you for making the message more precise. You are right, i dropped too much, but i also wanted to be easily understandable.
We started with contrib ports and it was fun and productive. People shouldn't fear doing it because things are still in transition.
Meanwhile, the expected outstanding core changes have been summarized by xjm and the good news is we're getting more stable every single day.
Initiative leader, maintainer and architect. For sustainability with Open Source.
Note that my post is meant as an overview; other major API changes are still possible and more minor ones are not listed. However, I agree that now is an excellent time for contrib developers to begin the module porting process (so long as it's clear that some work might have to be redone following later API changes). Specifically, the Drupal 8 release cycle phases chart we created recommends that contrib developers during this phase