By webel on

Webel IT Australia is releasing a new Drupal8 info and module assessment site here:

https://drupal8info.webel.com.au

Although developed primarily for my own use, it is being made public in the hope that it may be of use already to other Drupal developers interested in assessments of the readiness of Drupal8 core and contributed modules. The site also already includes lots of external links to essential Drupal8 docs, reviews, tips, tutorials and reviews by other developers.

Areas of immediate interest to other Drupal developers include:

  • The main Drupal8 core and contributed module tracking view, with my own categories for assessing readiness and usability of selected core and contributed modules
  • An overview of some likely issues, problems, gotchas and other remarks for D8 core and contributed modules. Not all of these are reported yet on Drupal.org, they are made available here both as freestyle descriptions and as links to official Drupal.org issue reports where available. They are based on minimal testing, and some of the perceived "issues" may merely be due to my own ignorance of Drupal8 (but I can assure you most of them are not, there are a lot of issues in some basic and essential core and contributed modules capabilities already).

It is no secret that I currently (as of Apr 2016) consider the various indications of the "production" readiness of Drupal8 on Drupal.org to be premature, and that is reflected in my rating categories. Nevertheless, I have been able to at least create this minimal Drupal8 site with just enough features to permit assessment of Drupal8 itself.

IMPORTANT: I will not be doing any further significant work on this Drupal8 info and module assessment site for the next few month; I have other (paid) work to do.

You are welcome to leave feedback via the site's contact form or via the Drupal.org user contact form, but I am unlikely to respond for the next few months, when I might have time for another burst of Drupal8 investigation and update my module assessments.

Towards UML models of Drupal8

Also of possible interest to advanced OO developers is my work on graphical UML Analysis Models of Drupal8. The long term aim is to "collect" subsets of analysis model elements by working through tutorials (such as the popular Acquia tutorials for D8) and Drupal.org documentation to form a (more or less) complete UML Analysis Model of Drupal8 and selected contributed modules (including my own modules). The basic process is already demonstrated at the INCOMPLETE UML trail: Acquia: Lessons 9.1 to 9.4 - Creating Elements, Theming Elements, and Managing Front-end Libraries. The UML diagrams in that trail are relatively complex, but the idea is to "collect" subsets of the complete UML analysis model of Drupal8 and then re-present them later elsewhere in more human-friendly educational diagrams with fewer elements per diagram. Eventually, these analysis diagrams and elements will also be related to selected reverse-engineered Drupal core and contributed model PHP code (the "design(ed") layer).

I am an absolute OO, UML and Design Patterns nut; if graphical software engineering does not interest you and you reckon you can live without it, then my UML analysis of Drupal8 probably won't interest you, and you may even wonder why I am bothering. My own opinion is that working with text/code only - without graphical engineering support- is basically working with only half of your brain, and you miss out on the incredible, explosive synthesis that happens when you combine both approaches. In any case, I learn software systems best when I model then with graphical UML. And I enjoy it and it makes me happy.

Dr Darren Kelly, Webel IT Australia

⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x