Annertech's #d8in8 (our Drupal 8 Competition) in Review
As part of our efforts to enhance our Drupal 8 knowledge, we have been running an internal competition called #D8in8 (don't worry, you didn't miss it on Twitter; it wasn't trending). Basically, each Annertechie had eight weeks to “do something” with Drupal 8 – port a module, build a theme, migrate a database, anything. After 4 weeks we all previewed our work in an internal Q&A session and tried to help break any blockers anyone had. Then, on Monday (23rd June) we premiered our “finished” products. First prize: a Google Nexus tablet; second prize, a subsidised DrupalCon Amsterdam ticket. Third prize: well, we all got paid to learn about Drupal.
Here's what was demoed:
Andrew Macpherson
Andrew maintains a number of popular Drupal modules, and used his time to port some of them to Drupal 8, find and solve a Drupal 8 beta blocker (and have it committed to core), and create some new functionality around field formatters and placeholders. Naturally, having seen the amount of work Andrew had completed, everyone was afraid to go second.
Mark Conroy
Mark stepped up to the plate. He had begun by re-creating annertech.com in Drupal 8, but having banged his head against the wall a number of times trying to call JavaScript in the theme's .info.yaml file, he abandoned ship and set about setting up a multi-lingual viral video website. The site featured a theme built from the ashes of Bartik, with responsive videos from YouTube and related videos per post via entity reference fields. YouTube videos were embedded by inputting the video id into a text field and then re-writing the text field's Twig file to wrap YouTube embed code around it and a wrapper div to make the videos responsive. Though a field formatter may have been a better solution (and lead to a Drupal 8 contrib module), Mark wanted some exposure to Twig.
Mike King
Mike demoed a very simple way to create a Drupal sub-theme – basically a .info.yaml file with a statement to tell the theme to use Bartik as the base theme (don't forget to call it base theme, not base_theme or similar). He could then add what was needed to his theme (a new CSS file, some JavaScript, custom twig files, etc) ensuring only a tiny overhead on the theme setup and performance.
Anthony Lindsay
Anthony created a new theme, starting from Stark. He then created a website for a photographer, where users can browse photographs, open them in a overlay, and, best of all, purchase them. Anthony used Realex as his payment gateway. Everything worked fine (after we cleared the caches!).
Tommy Lynge Jorgenson
Tommy created custom entities which were exposed these to views. When he was finished demoing his work, we had a working questions and answers game (with multiple choice answers) before us. Now, the competition was really getting going.
Gavin Hughes
Gavin began his #d8in8 task by porting some modules to Drupal 8, one of which was Magnific Popups. By the time the final bell had gone, the modules were not completely ported, though most of the functionality was there and certainly enough for us to see how it will work in the real world. Great to see a strong contender for Colorbox's dominance – configurable, slick, lightweight. We're looking forward to seeing the finished results of the port of this module from Gavin.
Sudev Pradhan
Sudev took the Facebook Connect module and ported part of it to Drupal 8. He showed us a working version of a website that you can login to with your Facebook account. Once logged in, a normal account is created on the website, which you can change the password for. You then have the option to login via the normal login form or Facebook for future uses.
Alan Burke
Alan has been doing a lot of work on the configuration management initiative and automating the deployment of code. He showed us (what he thought was) some basic CMI features, but rest-assured it lead to a very excited conversation about configuration, git, installation profiles, primary databases, features, git and more.
So, who won what? Ask us in Amsterdam, where the whole team will be for DrupalCon.
Do you know what would be great? If other companies ran similar competitions and get all got #d8in8 trending - it's looking a little lonely at the moment.