A quick look on the current state of Drupal 8 (ecosystem)

Eight months ago Drupal 8.0.0 was released. Exciting news for drupalists. Since then comparing D8’s features to its predecessor is a topic in daily business. «Can drupal 8 do what we can do now with 7 today?”. After playing around with D8 i get the feeling some crucial features are missing. Dries invited people to tell ”why we not use or migrate to drupal 8” – and got a clear answer: A majority of drupalist (60%) are waiting for certain modules. So the follow up question would be what are these modules.

On the fly my top 10 wishlist would be:

• pathauto
• token
• webform
• metadata
• views_bulk_operations
• flag
• rules
• xmlsitemap
• redirect
• search_api

Today it seems quite difficult to get a good overview of D8 ecosystem. Also because some module development moved to github to have a better collaboration tool. I was irritated to see no D8 version of the webform module in the download section on drupal.org  – That’s a module with 1/2 million downloads for D7. Comments on this issue gives some answers. Without committed maintainers from the beginning the porting takes much longer. A highly complex module like webform probably needs almost complete rewrite to fit into the new core of D8. Porting module from D7 to D6 was much easier. For forms we could use in some cases the core Form API, core contact forms or the eform module. But our clients would most likely miss out on the experience of D7s webform module.

Under the hood Drupal 8 core changed significantly. Symfony2 for example is now playing its music to give us new possibilities. I guess in some cases there are new solutions we have yet to discover. From a suitebuilder point of view, D8 is delightfully similar to what we know from D7. However, it will take some getting used to not trying to add the old modules we know to this new architecture.

In the end the importance of a variety of mature modules that play together nicely is crucial when it comes to efficiency, maintainability and stability of a project…

“I am confident that Drupal 8 will be adopted at “full-force” by the end of 2016.”
Dries Buytaert

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.