Are you ready for D8?

A month ago, I had the opportunity to attend Drupal Gov Camp — a Drupal conference geared towards government adoption. For those who don’t find the word Drupal familiar, it’s a web publishing platform using open source technology that the state uses to power our websites. Currently Drupal awaits a huge unveiling: Drupal 8 (also known as D8).

So we are on Drupal 7?

Yes. D8 is the next big version of Drupal getting ready for prime time. D8 has been in beta for a while now but is inching closer to release as the kinks and quirks are worked on. It was reassuring to see Drupal’s tagline “Come for the software, stay for the community” personified as I witnessed a raging community supporting Drupal. There is a complete ecosystem of developers, tech shops, students, academics, government agencies, nonprofits, and for profit organizations working hands on to make the next version a reality.

On July 13 Acquia, the primary commercial company supporting Drupal 8’s development, announced their support for D8. (Disclosure — GeorgiaGov platform is hosted on Acquia.) This means any organization hosting with Acquia and choosing to run D8 will be supported. D8 has the community excited for the prospects of using a tool that is architected very different but has held the consistency and continuity for a Drupal 7 user.

What are the new features?

Not only will it be a paradigm shift for developers but it will also have significant improvement for end users with updates to the content management, efficiency, and security. There are rumored to be hundreds of improvements — several new features, concepts, views, content types, and plugins. These specifically caught my attention:

• Improved content authoring experience.
  For many users who are unaware of the complexity levels between Drupal and WordPress, content entry is an issue. Drupal 7’s out of the box content module is not as user friendly as WordPress. (Disclaimer: Digital Services Georgia has implemented a contributed module to bridge this gap) There is also some discussion about in context editing so content managers don't have to make changes from the back-end. We will know more once we start reviewing the new release.
• Responsive and mobile-friendly themes out of the box.
  Responsive design has already rolled out for all of our agency websites. But we’re talking about the backend here. If you have attempted to update your content from a mobile device, you might have realized that the way your frontend adjusts to the screen leaves your backend looking archaic. As per D8’s beta release notes, there was a mandate to make D8’s backend responsive, thus making it a leading content management platform.
• Multilingual!
  So many of us want this for certain parts of our sites so we don't have to rely on automated translation services. D8 had a team focus on this effort called the Drupal Multilingual Initiative (D8MI). They have put in huge efforts to make D8 multilingual if a site needs to be. Including the backend.

So we need to move to D8 from D7 now?

Not quite. It’s still very early, especially since D8 has not officially released. There is no rush to move because D7 is a stable and supported environment. The community expects to support D7 for another couple years before pulling the plug. We at Digital Services Georgia are being proactive and taking every measure to make sure we keep an eye on the progress of D8. When the time is right, we will move to D8.

While we’re excited that a better and bigger version of Drupal awaits us, we will move when we have done our due diligence and are ready.

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