Starting a Drupal 8 Project? Let’s do a Technical Discovery - DrupalConAsia 2016 by Shashank and Ravindra
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The document discusses a technical discovery process for migrating a Drupal 6 site to Drupal 8, focusing on enhancing delivery quality and defining future-ready solutions. It outlines the analysis approach, including content type mapping, decision-making for modules, and quality assurance practices during development and deployment. Key considerations and challenges are also highlighted, including the need for better authoring capabilities, mobile responsiveness, and configuration management.
Starting a Drupal 8 Project? Let’s do a Technical Discovery - DrupalConAsia 2016 by Shashank and Ravindra
- 1. Proprietary & Confidential TECHNICAL DISCOVERY Ravindra Singh - @ravindrasingh01 Shashank Merothiya - @shashtra www.srijan.net | business@srijan.net
- 2. Proprietary & Confidential WHY WE NEED A TECHNICAL DISCOVERY? Better Delivery Quality Budget Which leads to...
- 3. Proprietary & Confidential ● Drupal 6 site to Drupal 8 Migration. ● the original site has been online for more than 5 years now ● and it needed an overhaul!! PROBLEM STATEMENT ● not just migrate the site but also redefine it. ● make it future ready!
- 4. Proprietary & Confidential INTRODUCTION TO PROJECT move from to here cue : *woahhh*
- 5. Proprietary & Confidential WHAT IS A DISCOVERY Discovery is an information gathering process that aims to generate valuable project data to ensure on-time and on-budget delivery Prior to initiating development, Presales team to work closely with the project stakeholders and end-users with the intent to: ● identify pain-areas in the business ● Ideate and determine appropriate solutions to address each problem ● Understand and improve user interaction with the proposed system ● Determine suitable application infrastructure and architecture ● Prepare and plan project deliverables and milestones
- 6. Proprietary & Confidential CONVINCING THE CLIENT ● being from a big publishing media house in India, needed to be convinced about the overwhelming new features of D8. Here is what we told them cue : *rapt attention*
- 7. Proprietary & Confidential CONVINCING THE CLIENT Better Authoring Capabilities in Drupal 8 ● a neater layout/finding fields at the right places ● allowing inline edits ● edits from the blocks itself ● new field types ○ date/datetime, link, phone, email, comments etc
- 8. Proprietary & Confidential CONVINCING THE CLIENT Better Authoring Capabilities in Drupal 8 Superior Configuration management ● import, export and synchronize the configurations between environments ● reduced maintenance cost cue : *but! but!*
- 9. Proprietary & Confidential CONVINCING THE CLIENT Better Authoring Capabilities in Drupal 8 Superior Configuration management Truly Mobile first approach ● in the last 5 years the growth of users spending time on mobile screens is 600% (from 0.4 hours to 2.8 hours everyday) ● we ensured that we were building for mobile and up Reference : (http://www.smartinsights.com/mobile-marketing/mobile-marketing- analytics/mobile-marketing-statistics/)
- 10. Proprietary & Confidential CONVINCING THE CLIENT Better Authoring Capabilities in Drupal 8 Superior Configuration management Truly Mobile first Approach Leveraging the power of HTML5 ● video and Audio Support - Magazine embracing more interactive content on the site ● availability of new tags(header,footer, nav) that help improve accessibility
- 11. Proprietary & Confidential CONVINCING THE CLIENT Better Authoring Capabilities in Drupal 8 Superior Configuration management Truly Mobile first Approach Leveraging the power of HTML5 Web Services ● exposing news content to third parties like Medium.com or Scroll.in to leverage larger audience
- 12. Proprietary & Confidential HOW WE APPROACHED THE ANALYSIS? Migration ● content types available Vs used ● reduced the number of content types by a good 8 (eight) ● mapping of the fields was necessary ○ not just to capture content but also to see best practices. Remember, the site is 5 years old! ● re-wiring/re-shuffling needed for a lot of content
- 13. Proprietary & Confidential HOW WE APPROACHED THE ANALYSIS? Migration Contributed Modules ● deadline to meet ○ Deciding which to help port and which to customize was important ○ Could not spend time in customizing everything ● modules like DFP, Quicktabs, webform block, views data export and even nodequeue aren’t available
- 14. Proprietary & Confidential HOW WE APPROACHED THE ANALYSIS? Migration Custom Modules ● Existing Custom Code ○ some of the custom work done in D6 could easily be managed as the modules are now available for them. Eg, Sharing widgets ○ our decision to move to D8 was based on this as there wasn’t too much custom code needed to port.
- 15. Proprietary & Confidential How we approached the analysis? Migration Contrib/Custom Modules URL Aliasing ● during migration we kept a track of old URLS ● redirects for these URLs to new URLs ● the new URLs were restructured to meet better SEO standards
- 16. Proprietary & Confidential DECISIONS ! DECISIONS ! ● Features Vs Config Management ○ both of them weren’t yet stable during the time of taking the decision (More about it a little later) ● Entityqueue Vs. Nodequeue ○ nodequeue isn’t available and entityqueue has restrictions ● Custom Vs. Port of module ○ more like “time Vs. value” where we can’t port everything on our own ○ took help from the community and sought advice on who was porting and when he/she intend to complete it ● People Content Type Vs Users ○ sensible use of Drupal more than anything else cue : *agreed!*
- 17. Proprietary & Confidential HOW WE DEVELOPED? ● internal training organized for the team by devs who have been playing with D8 earlier ○ D8 basics ○ module development ● those who had worked on D7 found it easy (site building). ○ we tried covering most of it using D8’s site building capabilities ● the team was actively seeking help on drupal’s IR channel ○ posting/updating issues on D.O ● with Twig templating engine we can keep the template separate from the logic. cue : *do try this at home!*
- 18. Proprietary & Confidential HOW WE ENSURED QUALITY? ● basic QA practices ○ test cases - easy to do as we had an existing site as benchmark ○ acceptance criteria - reviewed by client as some of the expectations had changed ● migration related quality standards ○ making sure that every content is moved. ■ used migrate and migrate drupal (core) module ■ no Migrate UI (hopefully by 8.1 (mentioned in #Driesnote)) ○ automated scripts were written to sanitize content and test approx 20K nodes ○ migration of assets along with articles (eg, images)
- 19. Proprietary & Confidential HOW WAS DEPLOYMENT PLANNED? ● features ○ block configs were not supported in the alpha version ● config management (had problems with it) ○ conflicted with other module dependency ● we had to partially move the configs manually! ○ now CMI is more stable though
- 20. Proprietary & Confidential THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND ● a lot of modules are not available (yet!) ● expertise in D8 low. ○ everyone is a beginner ○ lack of expertise in OOPs concepts ● not enough good articles are available for the devs to learn ● loads of research required ○ whether it’s our problem or something to do with a faulty module. ○ finalising approach for a lot of features cue : *making sense this!*
- 21. Proprietary & Confidential THINGS TO KEEP IN MIND ● search ○ Apache Solr just (27th Jan) released a stable module otherwise search would have been another pain ● DFP/Ads ○ a complete module has been created to provide basic features from D7 version ● hosting ○ not everyone supports D8 at the moment. ○ which means more experimentation needed cue : *Should.Applaud.Now*
- 22. Interested in joining or knowing more about us? Feel free to reach out to us through any of these channels. Happy to help! Contact us business@srijan.net www.srijan.net NEW DELHI GURGAON GOANEW YORK BANGALORE Headquarter: 8A - Vandana Building, 11 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi - 110001 INDIA Thank You