Drupal 8.0.0 released • Hacker News Board

Re: Drupal 8.0.0 released

#71

Post by Albright » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 4:37 AM UTC

x5n1 wrote: post #63

stevejburge wrote: post #62

If you're interested in ramping up quickly with Drupal 8, there's a completely free Drupal 8 class available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtaXuX0nEZk9MKY_ClWcP... There's over 60 videos. It's sponsored by http://Acquia.com (the biggest fish in the Drupal pond) and created by http://OSTraining.com , who are one of the top sources for Drupal videos.

From what I can see, very little UI differences between D7 and D8, most D7 and D6 developers should be right at home with D8.

Actually, D8 adds a few (optional) modules which add some nice UI flourishes to simplify things for administrators and content editors. The stock administration menu module has been greatly improved and made more user-friendly out of the box, and there's many places where you can now do in-place editing of content. Also, everything is responsive out-of-the-box, including the content editing forms.

Also, Overlay is gone. (Sorry about that showing up in D7. Some of us tried to stop it, but…)

Re: Drupal 8.0.0 released

#72

Post by cdnsteve » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 4:39 AM UTC

I'm skeptical about investing anymore time into Drupal after using 7 extensively for the past few years. Any work I've done was mainly custom module development, soap, rest apis, aws integrations, ecommerce, etc. Pretty app heavy stuff. It's not well suited for these tasks but it can do them if you get creative. This, of course, has great overhead and complexity.

I'm going to look closely at other options. It seems at this level that Drupal has been outgrown and that once you hit that point, for me, it feels like pressing the reset button and starting over. I'm bummed it has a growth ceiling.

I also feel strongly that the productivity level is deceiving. You race out of the gate with clicky this and module that, to later find working with a custom data model to be extremely painful or that you can only do things via interface and not in code. Unit testing, at least in 7 is non existent. Short term gains and long term pains. It does not feel like it was ever designed with developer speed and procutivity in focus.

So while I'm curious to hear of the new release I also just feel you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Part of this is the.community it has built for itself. Time will tell. I have a feeling D8 is between a rock and a hard place. At some point a framework is just way better. Tool for the job I guess.

Re: Drupal 8.0.0 released

#73

Post by silviogutierrez » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 5:01 AM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #44

anon6_ wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to link your site? Do you have any blog posts on how you manage to scale with drupal? Have you considered alternative solutions?

As mentioned in someone else's post, it is PortableApps.com. I left it off as I didn't want to be self promotional in the reference. Mine is far from the largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com and The Onion have done more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple servers and the like. Personally, for PortableApps.com, I've used Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation [1] and LABjs [2] to help quite a bit in ter…

NB: the onion does not run on drupal anymore. Not for a long time. It runs on Django: https://www.quora.com/Django-web-framework/Why-did-theonion-...

Re: Drupal 8.0.0 released

#74

Post by JohnTHaller » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 7:55 AM UTC

silviogutierrez wrote: post #73

JohnTHaller wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As mentioned in someone else's post, it is PortableApps.com. I left it off as I didn't want to be self promotional in the reference. Mine is far from the largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com and The Onion have done more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple servers and the like. Personally, for PortableApps.com, I've used Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation [1] and LABjs [2] to help quite a bit in ter…

NB: the onion does not run on drupal anymore. Not for a long time. It runs on Django: https://www.quora.com/Django-web-framework/Why-did-theonion-...

Quite true. They did have one of the largest Drupal sites for a while. I'd wager that the articles that explored how they did it would be a little outdated now as I think they were on Drupal 6 when they switched platforms.

Re: Drupal 8.0.0 released

#75

Post by mercer » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 1:40 PM UTC

cdnsteve wrote: post #72

I'm skeptical about investing anymore time into Drupal after using 7 extensively for the past few years. Any work I've done was mainly custom module development, soap, rest apis, aws integrations, ecommerce, etc. Pretty app heavy stuff. It's not well suited for these tasks but it can do them if you get creative. This, of course, has great overhead and complexity. I'm going to look closely at other options. It seems a…

I agree. While there are probably a bunch of use-cases where Drupal is a good solution, I find that it doesn't hit any 'sweet spot' that I care about.

For very simple sites I'm inclined to use a static site generator.

For relatively simple sites that need a CMS, I use Wordpress (much as I dislike it). The clients are often familiar with it, and it is pretty easy to set things up. And if I'm going the Wordpress route, I might as well take advantage of the high amount of plugins and the complete (and often cheap) themes that target specific industries.

For anything more complicated, I used to be in the Drupal camp, but now I opt for a framework approach. Rails, Express, or something like that. With every single site I've built in Drupal I always ran into the problem that the time spent on 'clicky this and module that' eventually outgrew the initial speed advantage, and I would have been better off doing these things in code in a environment optimized for this approach ('true' frameworks).

I think it's analogous to how many of my clients insist on using Wordpress and paying more for that instead of a static site. They would've been better off with a static site that I update for a small fee, or perhaps even a small lesson in FTP-ing and editing a file, but they wanted the 'option' of logging in and changing stuff. But many of them never do.

Similarly, the choice of Drupal sometimes seems to be primarily project managers who want the 'option' of making complex changes through the admin interface, just so they have the option. Never mind that the complexity tends to be high enough that you need a programmer anyways to pull it off, so you might as well just go the framework way.

Re: Drupal 8.0.0 released

#76

Post by SwellJoe » Sat, Nov 21, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

jlahijani wrote: post #65

SwellJoe wrote: post #35

I have very mixed feelings about Drupal. On one hand, it does have a lot of functionality available in third party modules; but the quality and completeness of them varies wildly , and most require custom code in order to be useful. Another issue is maintenance. I don't think I've ever met a well-maintained contrib module; even ones that seem to be actively maintained aren't what I would call "well" maintained...repo…

May I suggest taking a strong look at ProcessWire? You only need to deal with fields, templates and pages and all content is in a simple to understand tree hierarchy. I switched to it from WordPress 2.5 years ago and haven't looked back. Great developer community as well.

While it looks nice, it isn't in the category of software I would use. I don't need a CMS, per se.

I use Drupal for commerce with subscriptions, support ticket tracking, forums, software license management, and, only peripherally, for content management. So, it's not the "CMS" part of Drupal that matters to me. I need an ecosystem that contains a bunch of functionality that operates reasonably well together. Drupal, for all its warts, does actually have most of the code I need already written. While it's taken me months to migrate to Drupal 7, it would have taken years to implement all of the functionality I need from scratch (our website is not our core competency or what we're selling, it's a tool for supporting our actual products, so I don't have a team...it's just me).