Some things I've learned during my first few Drupal 8 projects.

1. Drupal 8 Lessons
Some things I think I know about D8 from a couple
projects.

2. AllSouth.org

3. BeValuant.com

4. Cyberwoven.com (headless Angular)

5. What’s not new
● Information architecture tools:
○ Nodes
○ Fields
○ Taxonomy
○ Menus
● The constant hunt for modules that do what you’re doing
○ Many are still missing, but new things arrive daily.
● The lack of a clear line between front-end and back-end (more in a sec).

6. Things needed to survive
1. New build and coding standards.
2. An understanding about composer vs drush vs drupal console.
3. NGinx is not for the faint of heart: no one has published a complete setup
guide yet.
4. If you have windows you have pain (twig upsets NTFS).
5. Core patches tend to be non-optional.
6. Cache tags are great, but require learning.
7. Twig is great, but requires learning and discipline.

7. What’s so great?
● Better integration with CKEditor (files and images can both be handled right).
● Symfony is allowing integrations with 3rd party tools to come online quickly.
● Some things are now surprisingly easy (API integrations).
● The two core base themes do not require keelhauling to make viable.
○ We’re using stable. Classy is still a bit heavy, but way better than D7.
● You get to write modern code (although the namespacing is a bit Java-esc)

8. XML to JSON made easy
$client = new Client();
try{
$res = $client->get($config->get('api_endpoint'),
[
'http_errors'=>false,
'query' => [
'key'=>$config->get('coop_api_key'),
'cuname'=>$searchSet,
'loctype'=>'A',
'zip'=>$request->get('zip'),
'maxradius'=>$range,
'maxresults'=>$limit,
],
]);
$decoderRing = new XmlEncoder();
$xml = $decoderRing->decode($res->getBody());
return new JsonResponse($xml);
} catch (RequestException $e) {
throw new HttpException($this->t('Unable to process request'));
}