Drupal 8? Drupal, Wait
If you’ve been following the Drupal community, you’re probably well aware of the impending arrival of Drupal 8. And if you’ve been following the Drupal community closely, you’ve probably been anxiously awaiting D8 since late 2012.
Well, we’re happy to say that the wait is over...sort of. D8 was technically released (in initial beta form) in October 2014. And while a lot of us here at Echo have gotten our hands on it and taken it out for a few spins, don’t expect to see any D8 sites flying out our doors anytime soon.
What’s the Hold Up?
The biggest problem is simply that Drupal 8 isn’t ready. Even Dries Buytaert, the creator of Drupal, said this year at DrupalCon Los Angeles that he doesn’t recommend using Drupal 8 for production websites yet. That’s not to say you couldn’t make a website using D8 if you really wanted to, but it would be a time-consuming and risky proposition: your developers would have to account for the steady stream of changes being made to D8 as the community addresses remaining bugs, and these core updates could trigger nasty bugs that could take down your whole site.
Trying to bring an old site into D8 would be harder still—the upgrade path isn’t fully supported, meaning you wouldn’t be able to move cleanly from a D6 or 7 site straight to D8. In addition, as of July 20, there are still a dozen critical D8 bugs left published on Drupal.org—down from the 28 that remained when Dries gave his keynote speech but still not the zero required for an official release candidate.
So when will it be ready? “The reality is, it’s done when it’s done,” says Dries. He and the other contributors’ stretch goal is to have the first official release available by the time Drupalcon Barcelona rolls around in mid-September, but in all likelihood, it’ll be closer to early 2016.
From what we’ve seen in our testing here at Echo, we have to say: D8 looks pretty sweet. Built-in Views integration, Twig support, and improved admin tools are among the many features we and a lot of Drupal developers have been awaiting for a long time. We’re hoping to start building our first D8 sites between late this year and early next year, but like Dries said—“It’s ready when it’s ready.”