 We are amazelapse we are a service provider So we don't have a product to sell as he does so we thought a lot like okay What could we what could we sell you? And so we said okay We have a lot of experience and we don't want to sell it because we are a droop all so I can give it for free and We're gonna tell you how our experience was Running production sites in droop all eight in all far and better Who are we or who is me? I'm Michael or people call me schnitzel. I'm the head technology of amazelapse We have offices in Austin, Zurich and Cape Town, South Africa and we do droop all and only droop all So a bit our journey and what do we do and we have our own website and And in April 2014. Yes one and a half years ago We set up the table and we said okay. There's this droop all eight coming. Let's build it in droop all eight And so it was alpha no beta yet and was quite a journey We build it already in two languages. We fixed a lot of issues We fixed things horribly because we had to go live, but it worked and then Drupal.com came so Drupal.com is more the business side of Drupal.org Where on Drupal.com you find a lot of case studies of people that build already or who builds stuff on Drupal on Drupal 7 and 8 You'll find marketing material if you need people to convince others why to use Drupal That's your resource and of course it's Drupal and it's owned by Dries So and he asked us if we can do it and we did it so in September 2014 We launched Drupal.com in Drupal 8 beta as well In only one language right now, but Drupal is used and spoken all over the world So we're gonna probably use it or we definitely gonna translate as well and to others Then we had a client in Switzerland and we called that brochure site These are just sites that basically tell who we are what do we do and we maybe have a news platform or news Part that say that's for us a brochure site and we build that in Drupal 8 And they've really liked it because now they're ready for the future They don't have to worry at all about how do I upgrade my site? That was in January 2015 and was the first one in four languages. So we stepped up the game a bit and Then we built a really easy site. We needed a website to show our group So Macy has a holding company on top. It's a one-pature Basically done in seven hours and so super easy, but people really like it and now everybody in the team starts to use Drupal 8 So that was in May 2015 a really easy site Then we had a bigger one and Switzerland likes to build tunnels and we just recently built the longest tunnels in the world And so we want to celebrate that so we actually launched a website With the Swiss transit or the Swiss rail system, but also with the government and that shows why it's done How it's done? It's a beautiful site and again, it's a brochure site So we built it in Drupal 8, but they didn't tell us though Is that they're gonna post in the newsletter and on their on their home page? So we had to scale luckily you were not hosted with you But our site could handle it and Drupal 8 the caching was unbelievable good. So that worked out really well So that was in June 2015. It's called Cotardo 2016. It's Drupal 8 beta as well and has five languages Yeah, and we're working on more so every site that currently goes out that is only the brochure site is built by us in Drupal 8 So we have right now four That in in building and some of them we're already done and they're really close to to going out so too long didn't read it works and It's really great. So coming back from Starting from six to seven. It's a completely different story. It's so much better and I'm gonna show you what parts were really great and why we believe that And you have to use it sometimes though. You have to be a bit creative Like you have to know Drupal in its own because sometimes you go to the website and it's just white No error or nothing there and then you maybe have to use your tools that you know Or sometimes there's no country module. No, it's missing and then you have to come up with cool solutions because it's not stable There's a there's a reason why it's not out there but As Drupal developers we we like challenges and so we go in there and we do that And the interesting is at our company nobody wants to go to triple seven anymore What we have to because we have big sites that need all these country modules And we have to but if they can choose like every project that we start like the scrum teams It's like, uh, we would like like how how can we do it now? And it is possible. Yeah, okay. We're gonna do it. Um Sometimes you have to step in and say like uh Commerce is not there yet. So um, but it's it's really cool to see people being really excited and waiting for it So we go through the different parts what we saw that People are like first of all the editors the people that you are using the site The fun was is we didn't even tell them that there's a new Drupal version Because they were used to Drupal seven and they didn't realize They just used it right away. Well, yeah, the things were a bit on a different layout But in the end it looks still like Drupal And it's the same way if you use tk editor in seven, they told already there on eight the behavior It's still called the notes the overview list. It's still the same. There's a translate tab It's just overall it's the same and they they really like really like the new layout so that the That the tabs or the The recording things at the bottom are now on the right side. So they can immediately see there's a publish button Directly, so it's much easier and they just told us like can't you please also enable that layout on Drupal seven? And I was like, yeah, I know doesn't work Um multilingual for us as Switzerland has having four official languages where english is none of them So actually having five Um is really important and I have to say and that's also I was part or I'm still part of the multilingual team for Drupal eight Everything is translatable out of core If you know, I gave a presentation. I think last Drupal con Europe. Um, why so in Drupal seven you need 29 modules to install to translate every single string on a Drupal seven side In Drupal eight there are four and they're already coming with core So if you install Drupal a core right away, you can translate everything and that's Freaking awesome to be honest The site builders Um, it feels right and complete. So An example for that. Let's say you want to add a link to a block in Drupal seven Doesn't work out of the box unless you put the link just in the in the body field Because you cannot add fields. Yes, there's a beans module that does that But again, it's not there in Drupal eight Everything is an entity and almost everything is fieldable So from a from a building perspective, you can reuse the tools that you use in other areas in Drupal You can just reuse and that makes it much easier Uh, because the concepts that somebody understood in for like the fields You can then use on other you have different view modes You have other things and it's just much easier to work overall In it and not like needing to install that country module And if you want to do that then you can't do that and and these things One of the really hard things if you're going to start using it trust that so there are Now we have blocked instances and custom block libraries It's a bit confusing give yourself time play around with it And basically what we did in Drupal seven you cannot place a block multiple times in a region Doesn't work unless you have like block clone or something And in eight you can do that out of the box and these are instances It's a bit confusing from the beginning But it works and we use it a lot I mean it was almost the first only possible layouting system that we had was placing blocks back to the old days But it worked and it's it's a bit strange sometimes and as I said you have to be a bit creative So like we had missing note queues We need note queues to get the editors like to say okay, which news you wanted to show on the front page Which you would do with Drupal seven no problem in eight. There is no bloat queues, but You have blocks and you have entity references so A note queue is nothing else than a block with an entity reference That you just reference your notes and you can drag them around and the block has a display and you show The the the blocks in it the notes the reference blocks on the front page In a specific view mode. It's there done. You don't need a country model anymore So a lot of time we have discussions like okay We need that this doesn't exist in in Drupal eight in contrib yet How we're going to do it and then we talk and talk and we realize well, we can actually do it with the core stuff so sometimes we have to be creative And also really interesting is that Drupal seven type builders they pick it up in like two hours Because again the systems is the same as Drupal seven. There is no real Big big change that happens in the ui people that know how to set up a content type can do it immediately in Drupal eight We did three trainings in different Drupal cons for Drupal eight people that never used Drupal eight And they've built their own site in a whole day It was possible. So it's it's definitely not that scary thing that everybody says like oh Drupal eight is so different We'll see where it is different later Or we see it now in the back end Drupal eight is object oriented all the way So if your developers do not know object oriented That is going to be hard and that is definitely one of the scary part There are some people that really really dislike the change to object oriented If we see though in in the other areas of php, especially with php five six which php seven It's where php goes and Drupal just follows that So my developers that are really into object oriented. They love it. They they really like it And it's great because the entity api that is now in core No matter if you want to create a node by code if you want to create a user by code if you want to Generate a view by code or if you want to use create I don't know your custom entity by code. It works exactly the same. There's no difference anymore And that just makes it much easier for people when they once picked up the entity api They can do everything on your side via code We have a new thing that is called plugins and services Which basically allows you to hack a core without hacking core Which is also really great if you dislike a part of Drupal It's 99% it's a service So you can just override it you can say okay like let's say you don't like guzzle The htd plank htdp client in Drupal if you don't like it You just disable it and you're you enable your own you don't have to hack core anymore You can just say replace that Subsystem please replace it and that allows us to much easier work with core and stuff One thing we learned though if you don't have an ide It will be really hard. So our whole companies which completely to php storm Even the front end people they use now They used other things before but now because that the type ahead and all the things of Telling you the classes and loading which where it loads. It's just much easier That's because of the object oriented. So it's much better The other part also if you don't know how to step debug it will be sometimes really hard Because you have so many classes that like loads each other. You just don't know where the error actually happens So If you can step debug and you have breakpoints, it's just much easier So we basically teach everybody with amazing like how to use a step debugger How it works and now everybody can use step debug and it's just much easier One other interesting problem is that most examples you find online. So if you search online, they're completely obsolete Why well we took five years and what during these five years we re-architected a lot of things So a lot of the examples that you find online Maybe you're done for Drupal alpha somewhere and they don't work anymore So if you search for good examples go to Drupal the dog slash projects example So which is the exemplary project which is meant to have examples for you The other way just look into core I mean core implements its own apis all the time and if you want to know How do I create a menu? Programmatically there is most probably a test that does that so just look into core and you will see how it works and how it's done And and then also really interesting thing is that non Drupal developers that are used to symphony can start working it right away I talked to multiple symphonies developers from Surrey and they just said well, I mean, it's not exactly symphony, but it's like Yeah, it's It's it's really similar. It's something I understand And then you show them Drupal 7 code and they run screaming away And so it's something they much bigger and I think that's a really big thing for Drupal 8 Because now we can easily work with others as well and we see it daily working So, um, I think that's one of the things that I really like To have just more people that can now do Drupal because it's not Drupal anymore. It's just php How everybody else is doing it Configuration management The thing we all have waited for and and I can tell you it's great. It's really awesome You can just change everything on your local site or in the dev side or whatever You export your whole configuration you go to the production and you install and it's exactly there all your content types All your fields everything everything everything The processes behind that the workflows are a bit hard. Um, so if you Got your watchdog Book from your goodie bag in there. There is a workflow explanation how it works Because if you have multiple environments and multiple people working at the same time It's it you just have to figure out your process. Um, but if after you've done that It's like nobody wants to go back to features And maybe we want to use features for now what it's actually was intended for But um for using features to actually use to do configuration management It's so much better front end Well go to front end sessions now and you will see people be happy And if you compare them to front end session three years before they were really struggling So twig, um definitely gives the front end now the tool sets they really want But it's not only twig. We did a lot of other things but twig. Yeah, it's just it's much better for them to work To create their custom html that they really want to We found that there is no need for a contra base theme So we just implement a new one Plain new theme because in triple seven we use omega But not for the sake of the layout thing and stuff or basically just a resetting We want to have a bit html 5 in there, but triple 8 is already html 5 out of the box So you just create your own theme. You don't need a contra theme anymore to to build your stuff And if you are into twig you should definitely look into extend and blocks So basically templates can now extend each other So you can say I have my first template and I have a second template I only override that part Um, which is really cool. It allows the front end people to um to do Dependencies in templates, which was not something was never possible before and now it is So we use that a lot To just change small little things when the client says, yeah, but on that news blog the title should be slightly different because Whatever, you can now do that in templates. Um, which was a bit a hassle in triple seven Upgrades Before beta 9 it was really hard. We've rebuilt amazing labs would come three times completely from scratch Because there was no upgrade path or writing upgrade scripts took actually longer than just rebuilding the whole thing And so triple dot com we spent 47 hours once to upgrade it We had a fully upgrade script and it just pressed once and it was all done, but it took a lot of time Um, so before beta 9 there is basically no support. So if you have a site before beta 9 You probably have to rebuild it or Yeah, no probably and after beta 9 there was head to head which was a contrip project which basically Created patches for each head So every time there is a new head or basically every day or every hour that somebody committed something A person took on the task to say, okay I gotta write a small script that upgrades between these two versions. The good thing is not every head actually breaks your database So there were not so many and there's also beta 2 beta, which is basically just a combination of all the scripts around at once And so if you have a version of the 9 beta 9, that's where you want to go and you will find all the different Scripts to upgrade your site and since beta 15 we have upgrades in core So basically right now you don't have to wait for the rc If you now take triple 8 and you install it and there's a new version There's a beta 16 coming out. You just put the beta 16 hit the update page and it will update it automatically So no worries anymore to not use triple 8 already because it upgrades you Maybe please make a backup because we try as a core team. We try to support everything We just can't it's just really hard, but um, maybe make a backup before and Contrip What we all like in triple 7 we're getting there So contrape right now is the big like because we are really really close to api freezes or it's almost Everything frozen now. Um, they don't change a lot anymore. So contrape can really go in and and start playing around But we still need to work much more on there. It's not done yet and so what we do One of the problem is you don't really know from the triple the door project page if it actually works or not It's really hard You can maybe check on like, okay, which is the last latest version It's a bit trial and error So a lot of time you just install it on your local site and maybe we'll break maybe it will work It's a bit hard sometimes And so you have to just try it out But if it's broken It's most probably it's not a lot hard to fix Most of the time some configuration changed or something else just a small thing Changed and you can easily fix it. But then please please please write the patch for it Write the patch for it contributed back So that we all can use it So overall you should also using it If you don't have a development site on your local go to simply test me It's a one-click triple 8 try out. Um, so There's nearly no wearing us. Um, sorry couple of things though um I would suggest to use it if you build a new site because migrating and existing triple six or seven It works, but it's not completely fully fully done. So if you build a new site, that's definitely what you can use Or if you only need to migrate some content Like a macy labs. We migrated all blog posts But we rebuilt all the team pages because they anyway changed and writing a migration script just for the content Um was like 150 lines of code. So it was really easy for us to just migrate some of the content and if you don't need any heavy country modules So if your website depends on commerce on organic groups or other stuff You definitely have to wait because they are not ready yet They will be really really soon ready but right now yeah so if you need more help um go to groups robot.org slash triple 8 production sites which is um a site where All the crazy people that already have triple 8 in production running are on there and we help each other So we share code. We share stuff that already works and doesn't work And so it's really great for finding other people and finding help if you run into problems or stuff like that Yeah Basically, I was a session If you have questions Maybe ask them right now because we have more five more minutes or just ask them afterwards Hi, just one question. The you said upgrading content is straightforward or kind of works And you said from beta 6 onwards Does content upgrade work from beta 4? What do you mean if Well, you said if if you were you were specifically talking about taking a Drupal 7 site Yes, you said if you're just moving content, that's pretty straightforward. Yes, and then you also said that from six onwards Upgrading is easy What about if you've got a Drupal 8 beta 4 webs or beta 4 website and you want to So migrate module which is in triple 8 core Can upgrade from Drupal 6 to and Drupal 7 to 8 it cannot upgrade from Drupal 8 to 8 So if you have a version before beta 9, yeah, um It there is no automated system That can do that But we released all our scripts that we've built from the different beta versions. We all released them So um, you can definitely look into them and basically what we did We just migrated from beta 3 I guess to beta 9 and afterwards then you have all the other tools Okay, so if you have a version before beta 9 look at the scripts and It will help you there. Yeah, good. Okay, then I wish you a lot of fun with Drupal 8 Thank you