What You Should Know Before Moving to Drupal 8

In previous article we have discussed awaited release of Drupal 8 that will be filled with new ideas and features. Here we would like to discuss the transformation users will undergo while moving from Drupal 7 to the new Drupal 8. Such as any other Drupal that was released it is expected for Drupal 8 to take quite some time before a lot of its critical add-on modules will be stable and overall environment becomes mature and stabilized. It took about a year for a current Drupal 7 to become relatively stable and mature. It is very common for enterprise Drupal sites to be employing more than 100 add-on modules. What possibly can happen is that a lot of them could be discontinued and not going to be available for the new Drupal 8, when some others will be completely available with upgrades. What we recommend is before making a move take some time and go through thorough evaluation of your site and figure out its needs. In some cases it would be very smart to wait for the particular modules to become available that are critical for your site. Here are 4 tips on how to be prepared to make a transformation from Drupal 7 to Version 8: 1. Using Basic Functionality Make sure that in solutions you are constructing or modules that you choose, you are not inventing something new and unique, but leveraging what Drupal core has to offer and provides with new version 8. 2. Become Modular You might need to redo and rework the approach you have in the upcoming version of Drupal, in that case scenario you will need to have your code split down into small pieces with clear API’s. Thereby, you want your customization and your work to be as modular as it possible. 3. Choose Proven Modules Every Drupal user should be very cautious when selecting or adding modules. We highly recommend choose modules with a good history of fairly stable releases. It is best, when you check out the usage history pick the module with more than 10.000 active sites. Anyhow the best scenario is when you are going to use fewer modules as possible. 4. Use Caution in Areas in Flux Many of Drupal’s users nowadays growing and building sites using version 6 or 7. We want to warn you that areas like Mobile and Multilingual will change and transform a lot. It is a good chance as you adopt Drupal 8 you will be forced to rebuild those specific aspects of your site. No reason to wait on adding functionality needed now, but rather you should monitor development of Drupal 8 and be prepared to re do your solutions to fit version 8 paradigms.