The Experts Speak – What makes Drupal 8 so appealing?
Originally posted on https://www.specbee.com/blogs/experts-speak-what-makes-drupal-8-so-appealing
Horse racing, also popularly known as a sport for Kings, is now a multi-billion dollar industry with people gambling and betting left right and centre. If you want to stand a chance at winning, there’s nothing like getting it straight from the horse’s mouth – the ones closest to the horse (trainers, stable lads, etc.).
Drupal 8 is not just packed with features that alleviate digital experiencesfor the end user but is also making life easier for developers, content authors and site builders.
We can talk all we want about how fantastic Drupal 8 is, but wouldn’t you want to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth? So here are some insights from some of the top (and passionate) Drupal experts and developers on Drupal 8 and how it has significantly refined and eased the way they work.
“You want to enable your developers to easily deliver content to different devices, channels, and platforms. This means that the content needs to be available through APIs. This is aligned with Drupal 8’s roadmap, where we are focused on web services capabilities.”
Dries Buytaert
If you know Drupal, you HAVE to know Dries. He’s the founder of Drupal, CTO of Acquia, an excellent blogger and a Young global leader at the World Economic Forum.
Quoting him from one of his blogs where he was talking about why headless Drupal is gaining more and more popularity within organizations and how Drupal 8 is focusing on making it more efficient and easy to adopt –
“You want to enable your developers to easily deliver content to different devices, channels, and platforms. This means that the content needs to be available through APIs. This is aligned with Drupal 8’s roadmap, where we are focused on web services capabilities. Through Drupal’s web service APIs, developers can build freely in different front-end technologies, such as Angular, React, Ember, and Swift, as well as Java and .NET. For developers, accomplishing this without the maintenance burden of a full Drupal site or the complexity of configuring standard Drupal to be decoupled is key.”
He also gives us some statistics on the adoption of Drupal 8 – “Drupal 8 continues to gain momentum, as the number of Drupal 8 sites has grown 51 percent year-over-year.”
“Thanks to the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, translation is not an afterthought in Core anymore. And thanks to the clean APIs that were designed with this in mind, we are able to improve every day the functionalities for our clients in our integration with Drupal 8.”
Penyaskito
Penyaskito is a Drupal contributor and developer at Lingotek where they provide translation services and a cloud-based translation management system for their clients.
We asked him how Drupal 8 has impacted the way he works now and these are his thoughts on it –
“Thanks to the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, translation is not an afterthought in Core anymore. And thanks to the clean APIs that were designed with this in mind, we are able to improve every day the functionalities for our clients in our integration with Drupal 8. While with other CMS we devote time constantly to integrate with contributed modules or alike, we can focus on new functionalities as this APIs make us compatible with most contrib modules out of the box without any extra effort on our side.”
“What really did change my way of working was the Configuration Management Initiative’s work and by changed I mean massively improved.In Drupal 8 a solid reproducable, testable CI and deployment process is not just possible but easy.”
Nick Wilde
Nick is a Full-stack developer (including DevOps) at North Studios and is extremely passionate about Drupal 8.
Did Drupal 8 change the way he worked?
“I love a *lot* of the changes in Drupal 8 compared to 7 or 6, but most of them didn’t really change the way I worked. I mean, sure, using slightly different hooks etc. – but that’s not really any different than integrating with different modules to my mind at least. What really did change my way of working was the Configuration Management Initiative’s work and by changed I mean massively improved. Yes, some degree of custom integration is possible with Drupal 7 with hook_update_N() and/or thefeatures module but in Drupal 8 a solid reproducible, testable CI and deployment process is not just possible but easy. (Yes, I’m a smidge of a fanatic about DevOps and process despite being primarily a developer). When doing complex back-end work, moving to an Object Oriented system has felt like coming home since I started programming with Python in an OOP code-base.”
“Drupal 8 is looking very interesting indeed, a big leap forwards from its previous versions. We are switching from one very popular CRM system into D8 as it will cut costs tremendously and not only that, recruitment will be easier given Drupal’s wide adoption in the community.”
Nick Lewis
Nick is a Drupal Developer, technologist, blogger, and a freelancer among many other things.
When asked about how Drupal 8 is influencing his work, he says –
“Drupal 8 is looking very interesting indeed, a big leap forwards from its previous versions. I’m busy working out how to get D8 modules up and running for a client project. Well I am working on a project right now for a large global fast food outlet (here in the UK), switching from one very popular CRM system into D8 as it will cut costs tremendously and not only that, recruitment will be easier given Drupal’s wide adoption in the community.”
“As a front-end developer, I really enjoy working in Drupal 8’s theme layer. The D8 libraries system is really easy to work with, and Twig just makes sense. This, coupled with importing and exporting configuration, saves me buckets of time during development.”
Mike Herchel
Mike is a Senior Frontend Developer at Lullabot and specializes in Drupal and Javascript.
What does he love about Drupal 8?
“As a front-end developer, I really enjoy working in Drupal 8’s theme layer. The D8 libraries system is really easy to work with, and Twig just makes sense. This, coupled with importing and exporting configuration, saves me buckets of time during development.”
“Although you could flex Drupal 7 to adapt to this changing environment, the real power and flexibility comes with having a Drupal 8 architecture where this flexibility is already in the core.”
Alex Moreno
Alex is a Software architect in London. Busy in Acquia helping big organizations, he’s passionate about Drupal, IoT and some more.
In one of his blogs he writes about how adopting Drupal 8 can turn out to be extremely cost-effective in the long-term while catching up with the ever-evolving technology transformations.
“Although you could flex Drupal 7 to adapt to this changing environment, the real power and flexibility comes with having a Drupal 8 architecture where this flexibility is already in the core. That has implications for performance, adaptability, simpler architecture of services around Drupal, etc.”
“Drupal 8 has changed the way I work. Now I’m much more productive and the results are much more professional, secure and scalable.”
Alvaro J. Hurtado
Alvaro is a Drupal developer at Front.id, loves challenges and honesty.
Here’s what he had to say about the impact of Drupal 8 on his work –
“Drupal 8 has changed the way I work. Now I’m much more productive and the results are much more professional, secure and scalable.”
“Drupal 8 had some great flexible and robust components which mostly worked for me. Even though there was a lot of learning to do, pretty soon I got the hang of it and found out that you don’t need a module for that.”
Malabya Tewari
We could not possibly complete our blog without telling you what our in-house Drupal expert, Malabya Tewari, has to say! Malabya is a Drupal practice head at Specbee and involves himself in guiding and training young minds on Drupal.
“When I started my career with Drupal 6 briefly and then moved on to Drupal 7, I really liked the abundance of modules Drupal 7 had. ‘There is a module for that’ was a common statement while building a feature. When I transitioned to Drupal 8 and when it was in its pre-release state, there were no contributed modules. Of course, views and entity reference were in core but it lacked the huge pool of modules that Drupal 7 had. Instead, Drupal 8 had some great flexible and robust components which mostly worked for me. Even though there was a lot of learning to do, pretty soon I got the hang of it and found out that you don’t need a module for that. That’s how it changed my working approach with Drupal 8 because I can build a lot of great things without any contributed module.”
So there, you have heard it from some of the most popular Drupalists in the world. Drupal 8 continues to beat its’ own record with every version upgrade while including more critical functionalities in the core. The good is simply getting better only because of the unending and invaluable contributions by the Drupal community.
A huge shout-out to all the wonderful Drupalists who took time out of their busy schedules to share their thoughts and help me with my research.