Upgrade to D8

Yeah, well. I know this needs to get done. And there are a few remaining outstanding issues in the D7 version that I'd like to get merged before that.

My problem: My old development environment (based on a very old Quickstart setup using a pretty old Linux in a VM) got too cranky, and I've yet to get a working replacement environment going (LAMP, Netbeans/Eclipse, debugger, drush). There seem to be a bajillion sites out there saying "Oh it's easy, just do thisthis never quite corresponds to the current release of something.

And while being pretty good at software development, I don't generally do web development, so I don't know all of the knobs and levers needed to get that working.

I try for a while, then have to put it aside for more pressing life things or my day job.

If I ever manage to find a straightforward recipe for setting up a Drupal development and debug environment under VMWare on a mac, I may be able to get this restarted.

I don't think it's so much your host machine as what's in your VM. Setting up an Ubuntu installation in a VM on my Mac is a piece of cake. Even the Apache/Mysql/PHP installation is straightforward. What I've found lacking is something to walk me through setting up a development environment (Eclipse, Xdebug, primarily) with the current Ubuntu and PHP7. I'm thinking that downgrading to PHP5.6 may help.

But then, I'm not trying to do heavy web site building, just Drupal module development.

samstamport -

It just shouldn't be so hard. I've been trying for several days now to set up a development environment in an Ubuntu VM. There seem to be several semi-successful attempts to recreate the QuickStart setup for newer Ubuntu and Drupal releases, but I haven't managed to make any of them work. QuickStart is way too old to be useful.

I'm working on it.

There are a few tickets I want to patch up on the D7 version before I tackle D8. I hope the D8 migration isn't too hard. I've read that there are scripts to help deal with that, but I fear that DateReminder may depend on too many D7 specifics.

At this point, though, I can't guess how long this will take. Sorry. I don't like this either.

I certainly wouldn't object. Like I say, the blocker has been getting a development environment set up. The old QuickStart load was great, but way too old.

I think I'm getting closer now. I've been using the "DrupalPro14" scripts, and have been figuring out how to work around the glitches. It helps to make clones periodically so I can back up to a previous step when something breaks.

Slow going, though.

Yeah, sidetracked. There's this thing called a "job," and then a death in the family, and then a conference to go to....

I feel like I'm oh so close to getting a development environment set up, but then another gotcha. That old QuickStart image was just *so* handy. It's frustrating that that was never replaced by something functioning.

Sheesh! It just shouldn't be so hard. But I've finally managed to get an Ubuntu 14 development environment working. Netbeans, xdebug, all of that stuff.

Now I just need to set up some test nodes and I can try exercising code again. Finally!!!

I first want to get a couple of long-overdue D7 issues resolved, then I'll be able take on D8, which will be a new experience for me. I haven't used it at all.

Sorry, I don't know enough about D8 to know what you're trying to do with your example, but it's pretty minimal, and not even complete php.

I read somewhere that there's a tool to help with the D7->D8 migration, and I'll probably start with that.

@samstamport I'm not sure on D8 but check out https://www.drupal.org/project/mailsystem

MailSystem

Tutorial on The Drupal mail system (D7 but great overview) by Provonix

Tutorials on Email in D8

• Recent! How to send mail programmatically in Drupal 8
• Install and use Swift Mailer in Drupal 8 (part 1 : dependency) on Windows.
• Using and Extending the Drupal 8 Mail API: Part 1 from August 2015
• Using and Extending the Drupal 8 Mail API: Part 2 from August 2015

@dwillcox Will you be posting code on a Git repo for us to help test and submit to?

I finally got myself a local development environment setup (yay Docker4Drupal and PhPStorm!), and started to chip away at porting DateReminder to D8. There's an awful lot of stuff changed. Yes, I like the more thoroughly OO structure, but there's quite a learning curve.

I'd gotten some very basic stuff figured out. Installation and very basic module configuration, and went to extend my test environment to have something DateReminder could work with.

Unfortunately, I discovered that, in spite of how long it's been out, D8 is lacking in a number of features that would make DateReminder kind of pointless.

There is a repeating date module, but's still in beta.

And Calendar isn't available at all.

Makes it seem a lot less useful.

So in case anyone's paying attention, I recently retired, so the "job" thing is no longer an impediment. And in the interim it seems that meeting up a development environment on my Mac (PhpStorm, Docker) has gotten easier.

But...

It still seems that Drupal 8 is missing some things that would be essential for this to be useful, specifically calendars that support repeated dates.

There are repeated date fields, but

• the current calendar doesn't honor the repeats, and
• defining the repeated dates is not something I'd expect a mere human to want to do

There are a lot of interactions needed, so I may just start using the existing repeated fields and hope that Calendar catches up. But it's already been years.

If anyone has any suggestions I'd love to hear.