Category Technology
Publication date
20 July 2015
We're ready for Drupal 8. Are you?
With only 5 critical issues marked as "needs work", Drupal 8 - the most brilliantly amazing responsive accessible version of Drupal to be released so far - is just around the corner (we're so excited, we forgot to put commas in that list of adjectives). Last week Acquia announced they now have Drupal 8 available on their platform for clients to start building their D8 sites on. This announcement is a very important one, and a signal that we must all get very serious about planning upgrades from Drupal 6 to either Drupal 7 or 8 sooner rather than later.
- At Annertech we've put a lot of time and resources into getting ourselves ready for Drupal 8. We are the only Irish agency that has contributed any code to the Drupal 8 codebase, having made almost 40 contributions to Drupal 8 core and many more to contributed projects.
- Last year, we held an internal competition called "#D8in8" in which we gave ourselves 8 weeks to each build "something" in Drupal 8. Andrew, a senior backend developer won after creating/porting/patching so much for Drupal 8.
- Just before DrupalCon Amsterdam we launched our new Annertech.com website, built on Drupal 8 - and still the only Drupal 8 website built in Ireland.
What's going to be so great about Drupal 8?
- Mobile First: Drupal 8 is built with a mobile first approach for both backend and frontend, meaning mobile content editors and mobile content consumers are both equally provided for.
- Easier Authoring: Drupal 7 made huge gains on Drupal 6 for content editing. Drupal 8 takes this to a new level.
- Accessibility: Drupal 7 is quite accessible and can be perfectly accessible with a little work. Drupal 8 takes accessibiilty as a core value.
- Enterprise Ready: Drupal 8 is designed with enterprise in mind, though it can also be used for smaller websites, there will be no question about its ability to handle large scale projects.
- Multilingual: Massive changes to how multilingual requirements are met, which is hugely important for Irish-based (government) websites which usually need to be available in Irish and English.
- Performance: Huge caching improvements to ensure that your web page is served to your users as quickly as possible.
- RESTful: Ability for content to be Created Once, Published Everywhere (COPE) is much greater in D8, allowing you to publish your content in multiple formats on multiple platforms and apps.
We're ready for Drupal 8. Are you? If not, let us help you.
