Amazee Labs launches first customer website on Drupal 8

We just completed our third Drupal 8 project: SGG - Schweizer Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft. After relaunching our own website and helping out with Drupal.com (our first two Drupal 8 sites), we are excited to launch our first client website 100% on the upcoming major release of our favorite open source CMS. After we had built the community site Intergeneration and the voting platform CHymne using Drupal 7, we now chose Drupal 8 for the relaunch of the corporate website of SGG. The compact feature of the site allowed us to apply the strengths of Drupal 8 as per today and so we created the association's new website relying entirely on Drupal 8 core functionality. Building the new SGG website was a team effort; continue reading for the findings of each of us while we were creating the new site on the latest beta release of Drupal 8. Boris was involved with _site building _and these are his thoughts:

Drupal 8 in terms of sitebuilding is awesome. After a short time you are able to build almost everything out of the box. Sometimes you have to think around the corner to get your result. And sometimes you get stuck because of some nasty bugs. But with a great Backend-Developer at Hand (Alex) we could also solve some issues during creation of our project:

• Building content types is much more powerful with Drupal 8 core: you can define view modes, form modes and many field types like e-mail, entity reference etc have been integrated
• Full translation capabilities: thanks to #d8mi you don't need a dozen of i18n modules, but Drupal 8 core ships with configuration, content & interface translation
• WYSIWYG editing functionality is part of core and just works
• _Views in Core: we can create dynamic listings  _
• Enhanced block system: we can even reference blocks using entity reference now

Alex did backend development for the SGG relaunch and this is his feedback on the project:

1. A lot of things in D8 are plugins and the new plugin system is really cool: to extend a plugin, all you need is to extend its class and place your new class in the proper namespace.
2. Even if core still uses some PHP magic, everything is documented well with PHPDoc, and the IDEs help a lot to write code.
3. Hint: while Drupal 8 still is in beta stage, use core dev releases only for core development. I tried dev releases twice, in both cases a lot of functionality was broken. If you need D8 in production: use beta releases, they are much more stable.
4. Every piece of PHP code is covered with tests. That's super cool: if you want to understand how a thing works or what its purpose: read its tests and you will learn a lot from that.
5. Sad: there is no core stuff for testing JavaScript code. There are some contrib modules for that, but, anyway, it's not in the core, so JavaScript tests are not mandatory.
6. Sad: beta-to-beta updates are not ready. That makes core updates really hard. The good thing is that it's the target number one.
7. The translation system is really good. All translation cases are handled right in the core.

Overall, I have really really good feelings about D8. Previously we said "Drupal way" about many coding things. Now it's the "right way"! Drupal core now uses bleeding edge technologies, and that makes work really interesting.

Kathryn did front-end development, this is what she would like to share:

_Building a custom theme for Drupal 8 is almost an entirely different process than building one for Drupal 7. I think this is especially true for Amazee Labs since historically, we are "Panels people." Because the Panels module isn’t ready for Drupal 8, we're forced to make heavy use of template files. _ _In my experience with Drupal 8 (and on this project in particular), working with Twig templates is much more concise and straightforward to code than a D7 .tpl file. As a developer with only basic PHP skills, the Twig syntax is easier to grasp. _ For the SGG theme, there are over ten custom Twig templates, most of which extend upon another. _Even though the design of the SGG theme appears simple, there were many instances where the content display required use of the Twig {{ dump() }} function to drill into variables. _ _One thing I found frustrating during this process was sifting through the output of the dump’s results. Krumo formatting in D7 is so nice and tidy, while the D8 output is a jumbled mess, even after wrapping it in a

 tag. _
_To work around this, Kint is your new best friend. You’ll need to download the 8.x version of the Devel module, enable it, along with Devel Kint. Include {{ kint() }} in your template file and voilà - nested arrays that won’t make your head spin around. _
I could go on, but the gist of it is: mastering Twig continues to be my number one priority for Drupal 8. The SGG Drupal 8 project was no exception.

And this is the result: http://sgg-ssup.ch Creating web sites with Drupal 8 is possible today. You certainly have to be aware of constraints regarding not-yet-upgraded modules and account for some core bugs along the way. On the other hand, working with Drupal 8 just feels right already now: best practices from back-end to front-end development have been incorporated and the site building experience is really solid. Step by step we will approach bigger client projects with Drupal 8. Interested in a future proof website? - let's start a project together.