We’re digging into our first dry-run migrations from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8, and learning a lot about what’s ready and what’s not. And there’s some surprises in there…
Surprisingly good
First of all, Drupal 8 is pretty fantastic out of the box for simple sites. And the amount of stuff that gets migrated from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 is pretty astonishing — the migrate devs have done a great job of getting a lot of configuration migrated cleanly in the upgrade.
Configuration management is also insanely great. A couple times we’ve deployed development things that blew up the site completely, to the point you could not load any page at all — and a simple config edit let us turn those problem parts off and resume work in a matter of minutes, without even knowing how to recover from this minutes before.
And of course we already knew the editing, authoring, media management, mobile, theming, and overall user experience is a vast improvement over Drupal 7.
Surprisingly close
At DrupalCon Los Angeles last June, and even at this fall’s NW Drupal Summit, it seemed that a bunch of large, critical modules were really far off, many not even begun. As I run down the list of modules needed to upgrade some of our Drupal 6 customers, I’m a bit surprised to see a lot of progress on many of these:
Panels
In the Drupal 6 to 7 upgrade cycle, the big missing module was Views — without a stable Views, we didn’t find a customer comfortable doing a new site in Drupal 7 until some 10 months after Drupal 7 first came out. Now that Views is in core, Drupal 8 is so much more usable right out of the gate. But over the Drupal 7 cycle we came to adopt Panels on a majority of our sites, and find it invaluable to replace hard-coding stuff in themes, greatly expediting development.
Because we do have to re-build themes for any new Drupal 8 site, migrated or not, tools like Panels are a mainstay.
Panels and Page Manager both have alpha releases available, and an expected milestone of mid-February for having something mostly useful here.
Drupal Commerce
Commerce for Drupal 8 sounded a year off the last I checked, but there’s already an alpha release. I suspect it is still a long ways from having the support modules needed to having everything necessary to actually get a Commerce site up and running — payment gateway modules, rules, and much more. But to have the core Commerce module there and available to start building with is extremely promising.
Ubercart
This is a huge surprise — I was under the impression there would be no more Ubercart after Drupal 7. But there’s an alpha release for Drupal 8 already, too!
I’m sure we’ll see similar necessary modules not available for a while — but for those people still on an older Ubercart, this right away promises to make a much more straightforward upgrade path.
Organic Groups
Organic Groups has a few companies providing part-time dedicated development help to get OG up for Drupal 8, and it looks like development is going very quickly. No releases yet, but it’s looking like there will be something working much sooner than I expected.
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