Preparing for drupal 8

Why now?

It look like the drupal 8 betas are going to end soon. Last month there still were 40 critical bugs, it looked like there was no progress. But with beta 11 the critical bug count got cut in half!

This was a sign for me to get up to speed with the last developments. For that i'm using the great talk by Larry Garfield at last years drupalcon in Amsterdam.

Going through the motions

I have downloaded beta 11 on my windows machine and i'm using xampp to run it.

He said a controller can return a string, this seems not true anymore. I got an error the return should be a Response instance.

Installing modules aren't mentioned in the talk, but I got a strange error enabling the custom module. It appears to be a mysql setting issue.

In the routing.yml file he doesn't quote the path value, but it seems a lot of other modules do. So I guess it is a best practice to do so.

When he makes the module themeable, he uses the template folder. This generates an error saying you have to use templates.

This must be an oversight, the BlockBase class is in the Core folder.

Observations

Drupal 8 is major evolution for the platform. As Larry mentioned even drupal 7 is based on php4 practices, when it is almost ten years ago that php5 came out. It is my biggest gripe and drupal 8 wipes it out.

I'm not that found on the mix of yaml files and annotations for configuration, but splitting up the configuration is a developers dream after the hooks for everything way.

In drupal 7 it would have been more difficult to find the errors, but with the modern architecture errors made it easy to get to the problem and fix it. Goodbye common.inc, we won't miss you.

They didn't only modernized the architecture, they also added new default modules and an improved way of doing things, that make it an amazing content management platform.

With the mordernized architecture come great tools, instead of the devel module people have ported the web profiler from the symfony framework.

Questions from great readers

Why don't you use drush?

It looks like drush has still a long way to go to support drupal 8 on windows.

You need to use drush 8 to have drupal 8 support. There are a lot of articles that say drush 7 supports drupal 8, but drush 7 mentions otherwise.

When you install drush 8 with composer, the only way at the moment, the drush command doesn't work in the command prompt because it has linux syntax. The drush.bat command doesn't work either of the same reason.
The drush.php.bat command seems to work if you use it without parameters, but once you use it with parameters it can't find the tasks.

There is an alternative, drupal console. It works on windows.

Why can't I uncheck the custom module, once it's enabled?

It seems like a security measure to prevent a compromised data integrity. You can uninstall modules, so the unchecking hasn't disappeared.