Drupal 8 project killed

I realize I haven't updated my blog in awhile, because I've been in the thick of developing and rolling out our new site (check it out!). This was taking our existing Drupal 7 site for FSR Magazine and migrating it to this new site, which is responsive and better catered to deal with all food service news. Unfortunately, we ended up killing the Drupal 8 upgrade because it was just too complex, given our custom module codebase. D8 has a mindset change, where everything is an Entity and it takes a lot of OOP and YAML files to get things done.

I figure it would cost us hundreds of hours to upgrade to D8 and it was tempting to upgrade to D8 for the configuration management, Big Pipe, and better caching features. But that's time and money we didn't want to spend on the upgrade.

I've talked with some folks at my local Drupal User Group (shoutout TriDUG!) and several others are in the same boat, where existing sites aren't upgrading, but rather, they're doing new sites in D8.

At some point, we'll need to do something, but we're able to do what we need with D7. If pressed, it may be easier to port to Backdrop vs. upgrade to D8.