Drupal 8 | Modules Unraveled

150 What You Need to Know About Theming in Drupal 8 with Lewis Nyman and Morten DK - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Project

  • Drupal8 theming - why we did it
  • Plan for the unknown (responsive 2.0 how can we make D8 move forward & not break everything.
  • Seven theme & usability improvements in Drupal 8
    • Were you involved with Seven in Drupal 7?
    • What are your thoughts on alternate admin themes like Adminimal?
  • CSS architecture in Drupal 8
    • Why BEM?
  • Classy & Stable theme
    • Why you should always use a base-theme

Use Cases

  • How do the changes affect people who want to create custom themes and base themes?

Questions from Twitter

  • Eric J. Gruber
    Everything, really.
  • Dragan Eror
    How to remove query string from the end of CSS link, so I can enable browser's live reload? #MUP150 #drupal8
  • Eric J. Gruber
    What are some common hooks have changed from D7 to D8 that we need to be aware of?
  • Tamás Hajas
    Example about how can the new Stable theme help the work of frontenders. #MUP150
  • Tamás Hajas
    Status and future of core themes. #MUP150
  • why isnt seven called 8 ;)

148 Getting Up to Speed with Drupal 8 with Michael Marzovilla and Nick Selvaggio - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Drupal 8 from a site-builder’s perspective

  • What makes Drupal 8 different from Drupal 7 and other previous versions?
  • What about Drupal 8 are you most excited about?
    • CMI
  • What contributed module(s) are you most excited to see for D8?

Drupal 8 from a developer’s perspective

  • What makes Drupal 8 different from Drupal 7 and other previous versions?
  • What about Drupal 8 are you most excited about?
  • What’s making developing contributed modules better from your perspective?

StackStarter and TryDrupal8.com

  • What is StackStarter?
  • What is TryDrupal8.com?

143 The Role of Features in Drupal 8 with Mike Potter - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Features

  • Let’s start off with the basics, if you don’t mind. Can you give us the 30 second pitch for what Features is? I’m sure there are people listening right now that don’t use Features regularly.
  • What kind of data or configuration can you package into a feature?
  • What does Features do well?
  • Where does Features fall short?
  • What are some of the things people currently use Features for, that perhaps it wasn’t intended? Are there issues as a result?

Configuration Management in Drupal 8

  • If you don’t mind, I think it’d also be helpful if you could explain what CMI is in Drupal 8 so that when we compare the two, everyone knows what we’re talking about.
  • What does CMI do well?
  • Where does CMI fall short?

When to Use Features in Drupal 8

  • With CMI in core, where does Features find its place in Drupal 8?
  • How will we use Features differently in D8 as compared to D7?
  • Talk about config packager

Developing in Drupal 8

What was your experience building Features in Drupal 8? Did you get to port code from D7, or was it all from scratch? Is Drupal 8 as “hard” as some people are claiming?

Questions from Twitter

  • Thomas Svenson
    Just want to say I like the direction #Features is taking for Drupal 8. Especially that it is not needed on live site. #UXwin

142 Why Drupal 8 is the Most Important Product Release in the History of the WCM Market with Tom Wentworth - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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So, Doug Vann emailed the two of us a while ago and said that I should have you on because

"I'm on the record as a huge fan of Tom's for his well educated and well rounded perspective on proprietary and Open Source software solutions. ... I'd be excited to hear Tom interviewed on the topic of how Drupal 8 will continue to erode into the proprietary market."

I thought that sounded good, so here we are!

Web Content Management

  • When you replied, you said that Drupal 8 is the most important product release in the history of the WCM market. Can you start out by explaining what WCM stands for and what qualifies software as a WCM product?
  • You also mentioned that the 2nd most important release was Day Software’s CQ5. What is that?
  • When I hear about Drupal’s competitors, I generally hear about Wordpress and Joomla. Why aren’t either of those number two?

Drupal’s Place in the WCM Market

  • How has Drupal faired in the WCM market so far?
  • What do you see Drupal 8 bringing to the table that sets it apart from other products?

Questions from Twitter

  • Jacob Redding

    • How does Drupal 8 change the comparison with AEM? Specifically what are the features with Drupal 8 that bring Drupal to a more level playing field with AEM? Is there a single specific feature that Drupal does hands down better than AEM?
  • Doug Vann

    • MY MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION
      • Drupal promotes an "Ownership Society" where Universities, Media Companies, Governments, etc. hire in ​Drupal talent and build sites inhouse. How does D8 impact that trend? Is D8 more for shops and agencies and less for DIYers or is that just F.U.D. talking?​
    • Any Drupaler would state that Drupal has been "disruptive" insofar as we have allowed highly visible sites to ditch their proprietary CMS in favour of Drupal.
      • To date, has that success been "truly disruptive" by your definition?
      • With the astounding advancements baked into D8, are you looking forward to an even more disruptive presence in the CMS playing field?
    • Shops
      • Is Drupal 8 ushering in a new era which will see a fundamental shift in how Drupal is delivered in the areas of customer procurement, engagement, and delivery?
      • To reword that. Are Adobe CQ5 and Sitecore shops operating significantly different than Drupal shops today AND are we going to see Drupal shops retooling and reshaping to a more enterprise looking organization?
      • In The past 18+ months, it seems that more people are willing to ​admit that Drupal 8 is moving Drupal "Up Market." Agencies are often the vendor of choice in those deep waters. Should we expect some more mergers and acquisitions which will ultimately empower agencies to deliver Drupal services inhouse?​
    • ​The little guys
      • Where are the little guys in the D landscape?
      • Do you still see the $10K and the $45K range websites feeding the smaller end of the Drupal ecosystem?

135 Writing the Book Drupal 8 Configuration Management with Anja Schirwinski and Stefan Borchert - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Writing a Book for D8

  • What’s it like writing a book for a piece of software that isn’t even officially released yet?
  • How long did the writing process take?
    • Packt publishing sent us a proposal to write this book in December of 2013. We got started quickly, sending them an outline of the chapters and an estimated page count in the same month. The original estimated page count was 150, it turned out to be around 120. We received a pretty strict time line, having to finish a chapter every two weeks, starting in December of 2013.
    • We managed to finish most chapters in two weeks, but some of the longer ones took a little longer since we also started one of our biggest projects we had had until then, also in January. That was pretty tough because that project took up way more than a regular full time job, so we ended up having to write all of the chapters late at night and on the weekends. In May, all of our chapters then went to the editors and we didn’t hear back from the publisher for a really long time.
    • We also told them that we will have to rewrite a lot of the chapters since there was so much work in progress with the Configuration Management Initiative and they were changing a lot about how it worked, like going from the file based default to the database default. I think it was in January of 2015 when chapters came back with some feedback and we started rewriting every chapter, which was pretty painful at the time. We were able to update some of the documentation at drupal.org with the changes we found. It felt good to contribution at least a small part, when with our project and the book we had no time left to contribute code to Drupal 8 like we usually do.
    • We spent around 40 days on the book between the two of us.
    • In December, Packt asked the first publisher to review the book. We had recommended them one of our team members at undpaul, Tom, who has a similar amount of Drupal knowledge as Stefan. We really wanted to have someone from CMI to review the book, like Greg Dunlap. They had turned down reviewing the book after the first chapters were written, because too much would still change. Then after the changes went in we kept recommending Greg but I never heard anything back, maybe he was busy or they didn’t bother to ask. At the beginning of this year they told us the book was planned to be published by March. We recommended waiting because we didn’t expect a release candidate before the European Drupalcon and we would have rather had someone like Greg take the time to review, but Packt had another opinion :) Since most of CMI changes were finished, we didn’t feel too uncomfortable about the time of publishing, and it was also kind of nice to finally be done with this thing :) So it took a little over a year from start to finish. It was published on March 24th.
  • Do you expect to need to rewrite anything between now and when 8.0 is released?

The Book: Drupal 8 Configuration Management

  • What do you cover in the book?
    • We start of with a basic introduction to what Configuration Management in Drupal means, because it is a thing in Software development in general, that doesn’t usually refer to what it is in Drupal, where it basically just means that configuration is saved in files which makes deployment easier. In the first chapters, we make sure the reader understands what Configuration Management means and why version control is so important. We mention some best practices and then show how to use it for non-coders as well, since there’s a nice backend non-technical folks can use, even if you don’t use version control (which of course we don’t recommend). We also have a part that describes how managing configuration works in Drupal 7 (Features!) and then dive into code examples, explaining schema files, showing how to add configuration to a custom module, how to upgrade Drupal 7 variables to the new system and cover configuration management for multilingual sites.
  • Who is the target audience of the book?
  • Why did you decide to write about Configuration Management?
    • We have used Features to deploy configuration changes for a very long time, I don’t recall not using it since we started the company 5 years ago. We have talked about it at several DrupalCamps and Drupal User Groups and always tried to convince everyone to use it. We were really excited about the Configuration Management Initiative and thought it was a very good fit for us.
  • Before we started recording, you mentioned that there is a companion website to the book. Can you talk about what content we’ll find there, and what purpose that serves?
  • Are you building any sites in D8 at Undpaul?

134 Deciding when to upgrade to Drupal 8 with Kristof Van Tomme and Peter Kohan - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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d8upgrade.org

  • What is d8upgrade.org?
  • When did you put the site together?
    • Today
  • How were you offering the service before the site was up?
    • Talk about MVP
  • Why did you guys create this service?
    • Build a more direct communication channel for module maintainers - Mailing list (module devs talk to people using module
    • Initiative to get out the catch 22 - modules aren’t ready, so you can’t upgrade, you don’t upgrade so the modules don’t get money to be upgraded.
  • Does it cost anything?
    • Nope - it’s free
  • Are you planning to monitize the site in any way?
    • We expect a lot of site owners will be looking for a way to upgrade their website, if they don’t yet have an agency, we can help them find a good agency. If this evolves how we imagine, this could fuel the sales pipeline for our consultancy and a few selected partners. We are not going to go hardcore salesy on this, but put in links for module work and 2for1 discounts and hopefully some of those will convert into customers for us or our partners.
  • How does it work? What do I have to do to track a site?
    • As simple as possible, conscious choice to not make it a module - just copy paste your module page
  • How many people have signed up so far?
    • We’ve got a total of 73 sites now, some from the same people - after Drupalcon LA we expect that to become a few hundred.
  • What do you have planned for the future of the site?
    • The community misses a permission marketing channel for module developers. We would like to let site owners sign up for important information about the modules they use through a push communication channel. There is a lot of talk in the community that we are not getting any support from site owners for the development of D8, but we’ve made it almost impossible for them to stay up to date. There is no way they are going to start reading the issue queues of modules on regular basis.
  • I took a look at the site and saw something called 2for1 - Give to Get. What’s that?
    • This is part of the strategy we want to use to monetise the platform: we offer our customers a 2 dollar discount on their future D8 project for every dollar they invest in helping Drupal 8 get out of the door. This gets us more business and brings outside funding into the community. For too long we’ve been giving money from one developer’s pocket to the next developer’s pocket. We hope we can change that this way. We are inviting other consultancies to join us in this campaign, if you want to join, you can become a partner in the campaign.

Special Thanks!

Thank you FourKitchens for the DrupalCon Ticket and Kalamuna for helping offset my travel expenses! You guys (and gals) are all awesome!

127 Using Entity Pilot for Content Staging in Drupal 8 with Lee Rowlands - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Entity Pilot

  • What is Entity Pilot?
    • I’ve been working on Entity Pilot since February, and have slowly been working through my backlog of features - but now its ready for Beta testers so that’s why I here on the show.
  • How does Entity Pilot work?
    • The basic premise is you create your content like normal and then create a new departure. You can add the content to your departure in logical groups, or you can create one departure for each piece of content - its a pretty flexible workflow. So if you were working on a new product launch you might create all of that content on your staging site. You’d be able to see what the site will look like with the new content, preview the front-page and landing pages etc.
  • You’re using airport terminology, like “baggage”, “departure” and “arrival”. Can you break those down, and explain what each one entails?
    • Passengers
    • Baggage
    • Departure - When you create the departure the baggage handler service takes care of adding the dependencies - so if you create a node, any terms or images it requires, or the author account are automatically added as baggage.
    • Arrival - On another site, you setup your Entity Pilot account and then create a new Arrival. This presents you with the list of your flights that exist in Entity Pilot for your account. After selecting the flight for the arrival, you move to the approval stage.
    • Customs - The approval stage presents you with a list of content on the incoming flight. Each item can be previewed and if it matches existing content on the site the administrator is able to view a diff of the changplanet-drupal the desired items to import are selected and imported either immediately, or via background processing.
  • How does this work in a team?
  • Talk about security
  • Pricing

Use Cases

  • For marketing: Prepare content for a product launch on the staging site. Land the content on the live site on launch day.
  • For editors: Share content between your sites. Write content once and adapt to any site in your network.
  • For developers: Deploy content when you deploy code. Use real content not lorem ipsum. Solid APIs to integrate into your custom deployment workflow or code.

119 The Classy Base Theme for Drupal 8 with Scott Reeves and David Hernandez - Modules Unraveled Podcast

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Consensus Banana

  • How did this all get started? and where does the “banana” come from.
    • From Morten: 2 years ago at BadCamp John Albin was holding a plastic sword from the pirate fest the day before. It was known as the sword of consensus. At DrupalCon Austin Morten had a banana that he was using to point to people and ask “So can we agree on X?”. That is how it became the banana of consensus. It was basically a pointing stick.
  • Technically, what is the change.
    • Moving classes from core to a base theme called Classy.
    • Multi-phased approach.
    • Phase 1, move classes out of preprocess functions and into the core templates.
    • Create the Classy base theme.
    • Phase 2, copy the core template with classes to Classy, remove the classes from core.
  • Why do themers need this.
    • Better options
    • Not everyone wants the same markup (themer survey)
    • Avoiding php
    • No time wasted undoing core.
  • What work has been done, what is left.
    • Preprocess changes (phase 1) far along.
    • Classy is RTBC, waiting for Dries to approve.
    • Phase 2 to start at or just after Amsterdam (don’t need to wait until phase 1 is 100% complete)
  • Chance of failure?
    • Changes have to be in by RC1.
  • Who to thank?
    • joelpittet, mdrummond, crowdcg, lauriii, alexpott!
  • Are there any other theme layer changes to look forward to that have come about because of the banana consensus?
    • addClass/removeClass is in, what about setAttribute/removeAttribute? Similarities to jQuery make this (hopefully) more approachable for frontend developers.
  • Any other theming changes not related to banana?
    • Improved menu theming - menu.html.twig using a Twig macro

Use Cases

  • What it means for themers. What it means for developers.
    • Preprocess is still there so contrib can add classes if necessary - but is it necessary? Could it be done as a data- attribute?

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