From Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 - Drupal Intensive Course Overview

Author: Italo Mairo - @ All right reserved
italomairo.com
Drupal Intensive Overview
from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8
January 2017

italomairo.com
Engineer, Senior Php Js Drupal (7/8) Developer
More than 20 years of working experience  
in Digital Communication, Multimedia, Digital Cartography,
Web & Web GIS 2.0 Opensource Applications.
Experienced Drupal Developer 
more than 5 years of full-time work experience
on several advanced Drupal Web projects  
(from mid to enterprise level).
Individual Member of Drupal Association
Personal website: www.italomairo.com
Drupal.org username: itamair
Linkedin Profile: italomairo
Italo Mairo
Who I am …

Drupal Projects

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•It is powerful and flexible enough to meet the needs of a wide
range of projects, worldwide used as an highly scalable platform
for web content management
•The Drupal project is open source software. Anyone can
download, use, work on, and share it with others. It's built on
principles like collaboration, globalism, and innovation. It's
distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License
(GPL). There are no licensing fees, ever. Drupal will always be free.
•Drupal is maintained by one of the most innovative and numerous
open source communities in the world (as of March 2015, over
1,167,000 user accounts and over 37,000 developer accounts)
https://www.drupal.orgDrupal

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•Drupal is used to build web sites.
•It’s a highly modular, open source web content management
framework with an emphasis on collaboration.
•It is extensible, standards-compliant, and strives for clean code and a
small footprint.
•Drupal ships with basic core functionality, and additional functionality is
gained by enabling built-in or third-party modules.
•Drupal is designed to be customized, but customization is done by
overriding the core or by adding modules, not by modifying the code
in the core.
•Drupal’s design also successfully separates content management from
content presentation.
(source: Apress - Pro Drupal 7 Development)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal

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•Drupal is successfully used, as a best choice, for the most
complexed web solutions and products, from medium to the
enterprise level ones, such as:
- Corporate sites
- Entertainment sites
- E-commerce sites
- Media sites and blogs
- Forums
- Intranets
- Document management and workflow oriented sites
- Marketing automation sites
- Social networking sites
- etc.

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• enterprises, governments, higher education institutions, and NGOs.
• Drupal is the platform the United States, London, France, and more
use to communicate with citizens.
• It’s the framework of media companies like BBC, NBC, and MTV UK
rely on to inform and entertain the world.
• It’s part of how organizations and universities like Amnesty
International and the University of Oxford work to make the world a
better place.
• Read Drupal case studies or check out a list of organizations with
profiles on Drupal.org. 
• News: Nasdaq Chooses Drupal 8 (October 21, 2016)
Who uses Drupal

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• almost endless contents modeling and characterization
native capabilities, through Nodes and Entities Apis,
comments, taxonomies, etc.;
• multilingual capabilities and translation services;
• advanced & scalable users, roles and permissions
definitions and management;
• advanced media management;
• advanced and flexible front-end theming and back-
end content management & personalization with
regions, views, blocks, menu systems, forms Apis;
Drupal Strength points

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• interoperability with third-party applications and mobile/tablet
external applications, with web services and rest full Apis;
• sophisticate events and triggering systems;
• very efficient SEO system and modular solutions;
• high level of security, based on strict coding quality/standards
and best practices;
• very extensive and wide community;
• efficient collaboration and extending logics (no duplications of
similar modules);
• and many others …
Strength pointsDrupal

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Drupal Community Documentation
https://www.drupal.org/documentation
Site Building Guide
Add functionality and features such as e-commerce, forums, media, search,
geographic data, dates, workflow, messaging, forms, social networking, etc.
Audience: site builders, developers and business architects
Developer Guides
API Reference
Git documentation
Examples for Developers
Other Information
Code snippets
Troubleshooting
Tutorials and recipes

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Drupal Site Building Guide
drupa.org 'how to' guide for implementing business functionality and features
into your Drupal site.
https://www.drupal.org/documentation/build
• Modules in Drupal core - Built-in default modular functionality
• Contributed modules
• Themes in 'Drupal Core' - Built-in themes for site appearance
• Themes: Addon 'Contrib' Drupal themes to change site
appearance (contributed by our community members)
• Building the site functionality
• Distributions
• Drush - Easily Manage Drupal 'Local' or 'Online' with Unix
Command-Line
• HowTos

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•back-end functionalities definition and front-end theming requisites
analysis;
•contents model definition (content types, entities and taxonomies
definitions);
•definitions of specific roles, identification and set-up of general and
extended privileges and permissions;
•assessment of specific required functionalities and identification of
specific contribution / custom modules and “ad-hoc” functionalities
(i.e: commerce functionalities, translation functionalities, geocoding
and mapping functionalities);
Implementation WorkflowDrupal 7

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Drupal 7
Technology Stack
Drupal is written in PHP. All core Drupal code adheres to strict coding standards
Drupal ships with .htaccess files that secure the Drupal installation.
Clean URLs—that is, those devoid of question marks, ampersands, or other strange
characters—are achieved using Apache’s mod_rewrite component.
The database interface provides an API based on PHP data object (or PDO) and
allows Drupal to support any database that supports PHP.
For Drupal 7, the required version of PHP is 5.2.

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Drupal 7
An overview of the Drupal core (partial …)

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Drupal 7
Enabling additional modules
gives more functionality.

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Drupal 7
Files Layout and Structures
• The includes folder contains libraries of common functions that
Drupal uses.
• The misc folder stores JavaScript and miscellaneous icons and
images available to a stock Drupal installation.
• The modules folder contains the core modules
• The profiles folder contains different installation profiles for a site.
• The sites directory contains your modifications to Drupal in the
form of settings, modules, and themes.
• The sites/default/files folder is needed to store any files that are
uploaded to your site and subsequently served out.
• The themes folder contains the template engines and default
themes for Drupal.
• index.php is the main entry point for serving requests.
• update.php updates the database schema after a Drupal version
upgrade.
• robots.txt is a default implementation of the robot exclusion
standard.

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Drupal 7 Clean URLs & Aliases
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/configuring-clean-urls/enable-clean-urls
By default,  
Drupal uses and generates URLs that look like "http://www.example.com/?q=node/83".
With so-called clean URLs this would be displayed without the “?q="
as "http://www.example.com/node/83".
Enabling Clean URLs in Drupal 7
In Drupal 7, the installer tests .htaccess file for compatibility with Clean URLs: if the environment
is tested as compatible with Clean URLs, it will be enabled as part of the installation process
and no further action is required.
If you need to enable Clean URLs post installation, Drupal will run the clean URL test
automatically when you navigate to the Clean URLs configuration page (Administer >
Configuration > Search and metadata > Clean URLs), show the results, and allow you to save
configuration.
Clean URLs are enabled by Default in Drupal 8
The Pathauto module automatically generates URL/path aliases.
Pathauto

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Drupal 7
Hooks can be thought of as internal Drupal events.
Hooks allow modules to “hook into” what is happening in the rest of Drupal.
That means that any function named according to the convention
module_name + hook name
will be called.
For example, At the time the user logs in, Drupal fires hook_user_login.
We might write a custom module called my_module and include a function
called
my_module_user_login() {
// … does some stuff …
}
such as comment_user_login() in the comment module, locale_user_login() in
the locale module, node_user_login() in the node module,
The most common way to tap into Drupal’s core functionality is through the
implementation of hooks in modules.
Hooks

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Drupal 7 Hooks
/** 
* Invokes a hook in a particular module. 
* 
* All arguments are passed by value. Use drupal_alter() if you need to pass 
* arguments by reference. 
* 
* @param $module 
* The name of the module (without the .module extension). 
* @param $hook 
* The name of the hook to invoke. 
* @param ... 
* Arguments to pass to the hook implementation. 
* 
* @return 
* The return value of the hook implementation. 
* 
* @see drupal_alter() 
*/ 
function module_invoke($module, $hook)
includes/module.inc
https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes%21module.inc/group/hooks/7.x

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Drupal 7 Themes
In Drupal, the theme layer is responsible for creating the HTML (or
JSON, XML, etc.) that the browser will receive.
Drupal uses PHP Template as the primary templating engine, or
alternatively you can use the Easy Template System (ETS).
Drupal encourages separation of content and markup.
Drupal allows several ways to customize and override the look and
feel of your web site. The simplest way is by using a cascading style
sheet (CSS) to override Drupal’s built-in classes and IDs.
Drupal’s template files consist of standard HTML and PHP.
Template (theme hook) suggestions
Working with template suggestions
Theme developer Module

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Drupal 7 Blocks & Regions
A Block is information that can be enabled or disabled in a
specific location on your web site’s template.
Blocks are typically placed in a template’s sidebar, header, or
footer.
Blocks can be set to display on nodes of a certain type, only on
the front page, or according to other criteria.
Often blocks are used to present information that is customized
to the current user.
Regions where blocks may appear (such as the header, footer, or
right or left sidebar) are defined in a site’s theme; placement
and visibility of blocks within those regions is managed through
the web-based administrative interface.

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Drupal 7 Nodes
“What is a node?”
A node is a piece of content. Drupal assigns each piece of content an ID number
called a node ID (abbreviated in the code as $nid).
There are many different kinds of nodes, or node types.
Some common node types are “blog entry,” “poll,” and “forum.” Often the term
content type is used as a synonym for node type, although a node type is really a
more abstract concept and can be thought of as a derivation of a base node.

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Drupal 7 Nodes
All nodes have the following attributes stored within the node and node_revisions database
table:
• nid: A unique ID for the node.
• vid: A unique revision ID for the node, needed because Drupal can store content revisions
for each node.
• type: Every node has a node type—for example, blog, story, article, image, and so on.
• language: The language for the node. Out of the box, this column is empty, indicating
language-neutral nodes.
• title: A short 255-character string used as the node’s title, unless the node type declares
that it does not have a title, indicated by a 0 in the has_title field of the node_type
table.
• uid: The user ID of the author. By default, nodes have a single author.
• status: unpublished or published
• created: A Unix timestamp of when the node was created.
• changed: A Unix timestamp of when the node was last modified.
• comment: An integer field describing the status of the node’s comments.
• promote: An integer field to determine whether to show the node on the front page, with
two values: 1 & 0
• sticky: If the node should be stick to the top of node listings

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Drupal 7 Nodes
Basic Uses
• Creating custom content types
• Creating content
• Administering content
• Creating revisions
• User permissions
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/nodes-content-types-and-ﬁelds/about-nodes

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Drupal 7 Taxonomy
is the practice and science of classify content.
Taxonomy, a powerful core module, gives your sites use of the
organizational keywords known in other systems as categories,
tags, or metadata.
It allows you to connect, relate and classify your website’s
content. In Drupal, these terms are gathered within
"vocabularies". The Taxonomy module allows you to create,
manage and apply those vocabularies.
Drupal 7 and 8 has the ability to add taxonomy fields to
vocabularies and terms.
It will come in handy for everything from menu and navigation
schemes to view and display options.
Organizing content with taxonomies

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Drupal 7 Fields
Content in Drupal is composed of individual fields.
A node title is a field, as is the node body.
You can use fields in Drupal to construct any content type
For example, an Event, typically contains a title, a description (or
body), a start date, a start time, a duration, a location, and
possibly a link to register for the event.
In Drupal we have the ability to create content types using fields,
either programmatically by creating a module, or through the
Drupal administrative interface by creating a new content type
and assigning fields through the user interface.
Field API makes it extremely easy to create simple to complex
content types with very little programming.

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Drupal Download & Extend
https://www.drupal.org/download
Distributions
Modules
Extend and customize Drupal
functionality, and integrate with 3rd-
party services.
Drupal bundled with additional
projects such as themes, modules,
libraries, and installation profiles.
Themes
Most installed
Commerce Kickstart
Panopoly
Open Atrium
Opigno LMS
More most installed
Most installed
Chaos tool suite (ctools)
Views
Token
Pathauto
More most installed
Change the look and feel of your
Drupal site.
Most installed
Bootstrap
Zen
Omega
Adminimal- Responsive Administration Theme (Drupal 8
ready!)
More most installed
View the index of all modules.
View the index of all themes.

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Drupal Download & Extend
https://www.drupal.org/project/module_ﬁlter
https://www.drupal.org/project/ﬁlter_perms
https://www.drupal.org/project/admin_menu
https://www.drupal.org/project/examples
First Useful Modules

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Drupal Views Module
https://www.drupal.org/project/views
The views module allows administrators and site designers to create, manage, and display
lists of content.
Views can be understood as a user interface to compose SQL-queries, pulling information
(Content, Users, etc.) from the database and showing it on screen in the desired format.
Fields, or the individual pieces of data being displayed.
Relationships, or information about how data elements relate to one another.
Arguments(D6)/Contextual filters(D7), or additional parameters that dynamically
refine the view results, passed as part of the path.
Sort criteria Sort criteria, which determine the order of items displayed in the view
results.
Filters, which limit items displayed in the results.
Displays, which control where the output will be seen.
Header, which allow you to add by default one or more text area above the views
output.
Footer, which allow you to add by default one or more text area beneath the views
output.
Empty Text, content will be displayed, when you choose in the Arguments Section
"Action to take if argument is not present" the option "Display empty text”.
Permissions, define the access role to the View.

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Drupal 7 Menu System
Define the navigation menus, and route page requests to code based on URLs.
The Drupal menu system drives both the navigation system from a user perspective and the
callback system that Drupal uses to respond to URLs passed from the browser.
https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!menu.inc/group/menu/7.x
function hook_menu
hook_menu() implementations return an
associative array whose keys define paths
and whose values are an associative array of
properties for each path.
This hook enables modules to register paths in
order to define how URL requests are handled.
MENU_NORMAL_ITEM: Normal menu items show up in
the menu tree
MENU_CALLBACK: Callbacks simply register a path so
that the correct function is fired
MENU_LOCAL_TASK: Local tasks are rendered as tabs by
default.
/**
* Implementation of hook_menu().
*/
function menufun_menu() {
$items['menufun'] = array(
‘title’ => ‘Greeting’,
'page callback' => 'menufun_hello',
'access callback' => TRUE,
'type' => MENU_CALLBACK,
);
return $items;
}
/**
* Page callback.
*/
function menufun_hello() {
return t('Hello!');
}

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Drupal 7 QA & Coding Standards
The Drupal Coding Standards apply to code within Drupal and its contributed modules.
Coding standards
API documentation and comment standards
API Documentation Samples
CSS
JavaScript
CSS coding standards and best practices.
How to write documentation
collection of the complete API documentation examples
apply to code within Drupal and its contributed modules.
coding standards and best practices for Drupal.
https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/standards
Namespaces PHP 5.3 introduces namespaces to the language.
and more …

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Drupal 7 Multisite
Drupal has a feature which allows separate, independent sites to
be served from a single codebase. Each site has its own
database, configuration, files and base domain or URL.
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/multisite-drupal
Multi-site - Sharing the same code base
When to multisite
As a general rule on whether to use multisite installs or not you can say:
• If the sites are similar in functionality (use same modules or use the
same drupal distribution) do it.
• If the functionality is different don't use multisite.

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Drupal 7 Multisite, single shared database
The Domain Access project is a suite of modules that provide tools for running a
group of affiliated sites from one Drupal installation and a single shared database.
The module allows you to share users, content, and configurations across a group of
sites such as:
• example.com
• one.example.com
• two.example.com
• my.example.com
• thisexample.com <-- can use any domain string
• example.com:3000 <-- treats non-standard ports as unique
By default, these sites share all tables in your Drupal installation. The Domain Prefix
module (for Drupal 6) allows for selective, dynamic table prefixing for advanced
users
Domain Access Module
Multisite: Share users and user roles for existing set up
Share a single database across multiple sites

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Advanced Development Tools
• Coder/Codesniffer: development tool for php coding
standards and Drupal best practices;
• Devel: Drupal module containing development tools/
submodules;
• Drush: command line shell and Unix scripting interface for
Drupal;
• Composer: Dependency Manager for PHP and for Drupal
projects/modules
• … plus specific modules depending on Drupal version
(Features, Drupal Console, ecc.)
Drupal

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Git operational workflowDrupal

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Drupal 7 Continuous Integration, with Features
Must have Features:
https://www.drupal.org/project/features
Features
https://www.drupal.org/project/diff
Diff
Strongarm
https://www.drupal.org/project/strongarm
Features Extra
https://www.drupal.org/project/features_extra
https://www.drupal.org/project/context
Context

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Drupal 8
Drupal 8 is the latest, greatest release of the world's most
widely used enterprise web CMS.
It's fast. Flexible.
Drupal 8 taps into the concentrated innovation from its open
source community.
You can drive value and streamline your work with new
capabilities for successful digital experiences.
(source: https://www.drupal.com)
announced in 2012, and released in 2015

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Drupal 8
"Drupal 8 breaks the mold for dated content
management models and liberates content
from the page for the post-browser era.
Now we have the power to deliver the right
content, to the right audience, at the right
time, on the right device."
Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder

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Files Layout and StructuresDrupal 8
• The core folder (just it ! ) contains the Drupal core
(modules & themes included).
• The modules folder contains the custom/contrib
modules
• The profiles folder contains the custom/contrib profiles.
• The themes folder contains the custom/contrib themes.
• index.php is the main entry point for serving requests.
• update.php updates the database schema after a
Drupal version upgrade.
• robots.txt is a default implementation of the robot
exclusion standard.
• autoload.php is the entry point file to perform classes
autoload (PSR-4).

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New Features in CoreDrupal 8
(source: Acquia - The Ultimate Guide to Drupal 8)
“Proudly Invented Elsewhere”
As a counterpoint to our earlier sense of self-sufficiency and rejection of third- party
code, “Proudly Invented Elsewhere” represents a mind-shift among Drupal 8 core
developers. One of the great strengths of open source software is in not having to
reinvent the wheel and being able to build better solutions “on the shoulders of
giants.”
Drupal 8 preferred to funding on the best tool for the job (if available),  
versus creating something custom and specific to Drupal.
Some (major) external libraries that have been pulled and integrated are:
• PHPUnit for unit testing,
• Guzzle for performing HTTP (web service) requests,
• a variety of Symfony components
• Composer for pulling in external dependencies and class autoloading,
• and more many more (see the Vendor folder).

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This philosophy change also extends to the code base itself.
Drupal 8 embrace the way the rest of the world is writing code: decoupled,
object-oriented (OO), and embracing modern language features of PHP,
such as namespaces and traits.
Info files in Drupal 8 are now simple YAML files - the same as those used by
other languages and frameworks. The syntax is very similar (mostly : instead
of = everywhere, and arrays are formatted slightly differently), and it remains
very easy to read and write these files.
The awkward files[] key is gone, in favor of the PSR-4 standard for automatic
class autoloading via Composer.
“Proudly Invented Elsewhere”

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(source: https://it-consultis.com)
Drupal has over 200 new features and enhancements,
especially as it aligns itself with responsive mobile design
Symfony2 Framework
The Symfony2 framework overhauls the architecture with a completely new routing and
context system. The result is a Drupal 8 that improves on object-oriented programming, as
well as allowing it to adapt to modern PHP concepts.
Multilingual
Drupal 8 lets developers create multilingual sites with better support in core. Improvements
include a better translation interface, language maintenance options, site translations and
customizations.
Twig
Drupal 8 relies on the PHP template engine called Twig, which lends to a faster, more flexible,
and more secure performance. Twig ties in nicely with Symfony's class-based approach.
Mobile-ready
Mobile isn't going away, it's here to stay, which is why Drupal 8 makes sure it's as mobile-
ready as can be. Optimizing core themes and modules, Drupal 8 makes it a breeze to
create a mobile experience that's responsive and intuitive regardless of the device being
used.
Drupal 8

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WYSIWYG Editor
Drupal 8 ships with the CKEditor WYSIWYG editor in the default
installation.
In addition to supporting what you’d expect in a WYSIWYG editor—
buttons for bold, italic, images, links, and so on—it supports extras,
such as easily editable image captions, thanks to CKEditor’s new
Widgets feature, developed specifically for Drupal’s use.
It is fully integrated into Drupal 8, from user roles and permissions to
image management, and it ensures that we keep the benefits of
Drupal’s structured content concepts in our WYSIWYG
implementation.
Drupal 8 New Features in Core

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Quick Edit - In-place Editing
Drupal 8’s in-place editing feature allows editors to click into any
eld within a piece of content, anywhere it appears on the front-
end of the site and edit it right there, without ever visiting the
back-end editing form.
Full node content, user profiles, custom blocks, and more are all
editable in-place as well.
To replace Drupal 7’s default editing behavior, which required a
more time-consuming visit to the administrative back-end of the
site, this in-place editing feature has been backported to Drupal
7 as the Quick Edit module.

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Refreshed Admin Theme
The Seven administrative theme in Drupal 8 is a visually
refreshed version of Drupal 7’s, based on a formal style
guide which can also be used by module developers and
others concerned about backend usability.
Draft Support in Core
A draft revision-state for content is now has API support under-
the-hood in Drupal 8 core. This will make publishing-work ow
modules, like Workbench, much easier to implement in Drupal 8
and beyond.

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Mobile First
Drupal 8 has been designed with mobile in
mind, from the installer to the modules page.
Even new features, such as in-place editing,
are designed to work on the smallest of
screens.
The new search box on the modules page
adds to your Drupal-8-on-mobile experience
by saving you a lot of scrolling when you need
to get to the settings for a particular module.
Check out Module Filter for a similar
experience in Drupal 7.
Mobile-friendly Toolbar
Drupal 8 sports a responsive administrative toolbar that automatically expands and
orients itself horizontally on wide screens and collapses down to icons and orients
itself vertically on smaller screens.

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Drupal 8 also provides support for responsive
tables with table columns that can be
declared with high, medium, or low
importance.
 
This API is also built into the Views module, so
you can configure your own responsive
admin screens.
Responsive-ize ALL Things (Themes, Images, Tables...)
To support the unimaginable array of Internet-enabled devices coming in the
next 5+ years, Drupal 8 incorporates responsive design into everything it does.
All core themes are now responsive and automatically reflow elements, such as
menus and blocks, to fit well on mobile devices
Images that show up large on a desktop shrink down to t on a tablet or
smartphone, thanks to built-in support for responsive images.

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New Features in Core
Multilingual First
Drupal 8 is a CMS built from the ground up for multilingual use.
You can perform your entire site installation and setup in your language of
choice.
Right on the installer page, it auto-detects your browser’s language and auto-
selects that language for installation in the drop-down for your convenience.
When you install Drupal in any language other than English (or later add a new
language to your site), Drupal 8 automatically downloads the latest interface
translations from localize.drupal.org in your language, too. This works for right-to-
left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew, too.
Drupal 8 does away with the previous Drupal-concept of English as a “special”
language. If you select a language other than English on installation, the English
option will no longer show in your site configuration unless explicitly turned on.
Drupal 8

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Multilingual First - Fewer Modules, Packing a Bigger Punch
Making a site multilingual in Drupal 8 requires nothing more than activating one or more
of just four modules, all shipped with Drupal 8 core. These four modules do everything
and more than the roughly 30 contributed modules of a Drupal 7 site multilingual.
Language provides Drupal 8’s underlying language support. It is the base module and is
required by the other multilingual modules.
Configuration Translation makes things like blocks, menus, views, and so on, translatable.
Content Translation makes things such as nodes, taxonomy terms, and comments
translatable.
Interface Translation makes Drupal’s user interface itself translatable.
Language Selection Everywhere
Everything from system configuration settings to site components, such as blocks, views,
and menus, to individual eld values on content are translatable.
Drupal 8

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Views in Core!
The Views module, the most frequently used contributed module in Drupal, is
now part of Drupal 8 core and is more tightly integrated into Drupal then ever
before.
Beyond providing a query-builder UI and serving up the results in a variety of
formats for site visitors, baking Views into Drupal core allowed core developers
to replace numerous previously hardcoded admin pages with Views listings.
Everything you know and love from Views is included in Drupal 8 core—and
even a few extras such as mobile-friendly administration, some user experience
and accessibility improvements, the ability to create responsive table listings,
and the ability to turn any listing into a REST export that can be consumed by a
mobile application or other external service.
Drupal 8

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More and Better Blocks
In Drupal 8, you’ll notice a few new features as they relate to blocks.
First, just like with Views replacing admin pages, several previously hard-coded
site components have been converted to blocks, including breadcrumbs, site
name, and slogan.
This makes it easier to adjust page organization in the user interface, and
enables in-place editing, and makes for easier theming.
A nice addition to Drupal 8 is the ability to re-use blocks. You can place a block
in multiple places, for example, a “Navigation” block in both the header and
footer.
And finally, you can now create custom block types, just as you can create
custom content types, to allow for granular control over different styling,
different fields, and more. This allows you to create, for example, an “Ad” block
type with an “Ad code” field that can contain JavaScript snippets from a
remote ad service and then add and place as many di different blocks of that
type on your site as you need.
Drupal 8

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More Field Types
To build those data models, Drupal 8 includes a plethora of fundamental,
semantic field types like Taxonomy, Image, and File, ecc.
There are five completely new field types in the Drupal 8 core:
• Date
• Email
• Link
• Reference
• Telephone
Even the setting for whether comments are open or closed has been moved to
a field, making any entity type comment-able.
Fields are everywhere
Not only are there new fields, but you can now add fields in many more places.
You can add fields to nodes, blocks, comments, contact forms, taxonomy terms
and users.
Drupal 8

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Drupal 8
Form and render elements
Render arrays
"Render Arrays" or "Renderable Arrays" are the
building blocks of a Drupal page. A render
array is an associative array which conforms to
the standards and data structures used in
Drupal's Render API. The Render API is also
integrated with the Theme API.
In many cases, the data used to build a page
(and all parts of it) is kept as structured arrays
until the final stage of generating a response.
This provides enormous flexibility in extending,
slightly altering or completely overriding parts
of the page.
Render arrays are nested and thus form a tree.
Consider them Drupal's "render tree" — Drupal's
equivalent of the DOM.
$page = [
'#type' => 'page',
'content' => [
'system_main' =>
[…],
'another_block' =>
[…],
'#sorted' => TRUE,
),
'sidebar_first' => [
…
],
];

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Take a Tour
Drupal 8’s new Tour module lets site builders
create contextual, step-by-step tooltip-style
walkthroughs of your site. It can help with
overviews of administrative interfaces,
introduce new terminology, and walk
through the steps involved in configuring
components of your site.
Drupal 8
Both Less and More, Module-wise
You’ll find Drupal 8 missing some modules that shipped with Drupal 7, namely
Blog, Dashboard, Open ID, Overlay, PHP lter, Poll, Pro le, and Trigger (as well as
the Garland theme). You’ll find several new modules in which functionality has
been split out into more granular chunks, such as Menu Links/Menu UI, Block/
Custom Block, Ban/History/Actions (formally baked into User/Node/System
module), and so on.

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HTML5
All of Drupal’s output has been converted to use semantic HTML5 markup by default, as
part of an overarching effort to clean up Drupal’s default markup. This means you’ll find
tags such as <nav>, <header>,<main>, and <section> in Drupal’s default templates and
you’ll find HTML5/CSS3 replacements for several things that previously needed custom
workarounds: resizing on text areas and first/ last/odd/ even classes is now covered by
CSS3 pseudo-selectors; and collapsible fieldsets largely replaced by the by the <details>
element. 
New Front-end Libraries and Helpers
Besides jQuery, Drupal 8 brings with it an expanded array of front-end libraries, for
creating mobile-friendly, rich front-end applications in Drupal such as:
Modernizr (detects if a browser supports touch or HTML5/CSS3 features)
Underscore.js (a lightweight JS-helper library)
Backbone.js (a model-view-controller JavaScript framework).
Drupal 8
Front-end Developer Improvements

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Native Schema.Org Output
In a great boon for search-engine optimization, Drupal 8’s RDFa module now
outputs schema.org markup. This makes the task much easier for search engines
such as Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Yandex to extract and index data from your 
site because the schema.org markup is semantic.
Even More Improved Accessibility
Drupal 8 has expanded on Drupal 7’s existing stellar accessibility record with
even more improvements. Drupal 8 extensively uses WAI-ARIA attributes to
provide semantic meaning to elements.
On the back-end, Drupal 8 provides a variety of new Accessibility tools for
JavaScript (JS), which allow module developers to create accessible
applications easily.
Drupal 8

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Drupal 8 introduces Twig,
a very widely adopted theme system in the PHP world, to Drupal. Twig’s syntax
is simpler and Twig is more secure than the the PHPTemplate- based theme
system in Drupal 7 and below that it replaces.
It allows designers and themers with HTML/CSS knowledge to modify markup
without needing to be a PHP expert and with almost no risk of their actions
causing security issues on your site.
With Twig, themers no longer need to understand the syntax differences
between deeply-nested arrays and objects, nor when to use each.
In Twig, a simple {{ foo.bar }} statement does the trick. Simple conditional and
looping logic can be contained in {% ... %} tags.
Drupal 8
New Theme System: Twig

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<?php 
<main role=”main”>
<a id=”main-content”></a>{# link is in html.html.twig #}
<div class=”layout-content”> {{ page.highlighted }}
{{ title_pre x }} 
{% if title %} <h1>{{ title }}</h1> {% endif %}
{{ title_su x }} {{ tabs }}
{% if action_links %} 
<nav class=”action-links”>{{ action_links }}</nav> {% endif %}
{{ page.content }}
{{ feed_icons }} 
</div>{# /.layout-content #}
{% if page.sidebar_ rst %} 
<aside class=”layout-sidebar- rst” role=”complementary”> {{ page.sidebar_ rst }} 
</aside> 
{% endif %}
{% if page.sidebar_second %} 
<aside class=”layout-sidebar-second” role=”complementary”> {{ page.sidebar_second }} 
</aside> 
{% endif %}
</main>

?>
Twig syntax

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Twig MVC security
Twig effectively forces a separation of presentation and business logic, and all
variables going into template files are automatically escaped, far reducing
the risk of dangers like XSS vulnerabilities and making theming in Drupal 8 more
secure than ever before.
Twig Debug
using debug: true; in your site’s
services.yml file, helpful code comments
will be displayed throughout Drupal’s
generated markup to inform you where
to find the template for the markup
you’re trying to change, and which
particular “theme suggestion” is being
used to generate the markup.
<div class=”content”> 
 
 

<article data-history-node-id=”1” data-quickedit-
entity- id=”node/1” role=”article” class=”contextual-
region node node--type-article node--promoted
node--view-mode-full clear x” about=”/node/1”
typeof=”schema:Article”>
...

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Fast by Default
Acquia’s own llama-loving performance guru Wim Leers posited that the best way to
make the Internet as a whole faster is to make the leading CMSes fast by default.
This means that CMS’s need to have their high-performance settings enabled out-of- the-
box rather than require users to be savvy enough to find them in all their various locations.
You’ll notice that Drupal 8 ships with features such as CSS and JavaScript aggregation
already turned on for a much faster default installation. Huzzah!
Drupal 8 ships with a sites/example. settings. local.php le for exactly this purpose. It hard
codes the performance settings to o , which is extremely useful in a development
environment. Simply copy it, rename it as sites/default/settings.local.php, and
uncomment the following lines in sites/ default/settings.php:
<?php 
# if ( file_exists(__DIR__ . ‘/settings.local.php’)) { # include __DIR__ . ‘/settings.local.php’; 
#} 
?>

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New Method of Selectively Adding JS/CSS to the Page
Also helping out on the performance front, Drupal 8 has a new
recommended best- practice for registering JS and CSS assets (along with
their dependencies).
Assets are de ned in your MODULE/THEME.libraries.yml le as a series of
properties that you then reference in the #attached property of an element
or render array.
R.I.P. IE 6, 7, and 8
Another big improvement for front-end developers and designers is that
Drupal 8 core has officially dropped support for IE 6, 7, and 8, enabling the
use of jQuery 2.0 and other code that assumes modern HTML5/CSS3 browser
support.

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The Drupal 8’s new routing system,  
totally replaces the routing parts of hook_menu() in Drupal 7.
The path-to-page/access-check logic now lives in a YAML file using the same syntax
as the Symfony routing system, as Drupal 8's routing system is heavily based on
Symfony’s one, and both use the same syntax.
The page callback logic now lives in a “Controller” class (as in the standard model-
view-controller pattern) in a specially named folder (src), per the PSR-4 standard.
New Symfony based Routing System
example.name:
path: '/example/{name}'
defaults:
_controller: 'DrupalexampleControllerExampleController::content'
requirements:
_permission: 'access content'
Back-end Developer Improvements

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New Configuration Management System
Probably the most looked-forward-to change in Drupal 8, for both developers 
and site builders, is the new configuration management system.
In Drupal 7 and below, both content and configuration were saved to the database
(sometimes with a mix of both in the same table), making deploying configuration
changes from one environment to another (for example, development to production)
very tricky.
A variety of workarounds emerged for this, including hook_update_N(), Features module,
and of course the old standby.
In Drupal 8, all configuration changes (both standard admin settings forms, such as site
name, as well as any ConfigEntity including Views, user roles, and content types) run
through a unified Configuration API. Each environment has a “sync” directory to hold
configuration changes from other environments that are about to be imported for review.
For performance, active configuration is stored in a config table in the database, though
the storage location is swappable.

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Configuration Sync Workflow
Drupal 8 ships with a basic UI to do both single and full configuration imports and exports,
and configuration can also be moved around via the command line with Drush’s config-*
commands, which is handy when using version control systems such as Git.
The basic work ow (after making whatever configuration changes to your Drupal 8 site) is:
1. On the development site, export your site’s configuration. You’ll receive a tarball that
consists of lots of YAML files.
2. On production, import the files, which places them into the config “sync” area.
3. In the configuration UI, view the list of what configuration settings have changed and
view a “diff” of changes in advance.
4. If the changes are acceptable, synchronize them, which will replace production’s
current active store with the contents of the sync directory and become the new values
that Drupal will use to build pages.

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Content Deployment
Drupal 8.1 core ships with alpha-stability-support for migrating content such as
nodes, users, and taxonomy terms between sites via the Migrate, Migrate Drupal,
and the Migrate Drupal UI core experimental modules.
Nonetheless, one welcome addition to Drupal 8 has been the introduction of
UUIDs (universally unique identifiers) to every piece of content.
These UUIDs can be used to determine whether a piece of content from a source
site exists on a given destination site. This makes content imports/exports infinitely
easier because even if source and destination sites have a node/100, for
example, if the content is different, each will have a unique (obviously!) UUID.
Deploy module for the Drupal 8 version provides this feature.
If still on Drupal 7, you can get similar functionality to what core offers via the
Universally Unique IDentifier module.

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Entities, Entities, Everywhere!
Entities were a key new feature and concept in
Drupal 7, abstracting the ability to add fields to
other types of content than just nodes, such as
users and taxonomy terms.
In Drupal 8, the Entity API has been completely
overhauled to greatly improve 
the developer experience.
All entities are now classed objects that implement
a standard EntityInterface (no more guessing
which of the 100 entity hooks you’re required to
implement), with baked-in knowledge about the
active language (to aid in translation and
localization).
Drupal 7
<?php 
# Inconsistent Drupal 7 code.
$node->title $node-
>body[$langcode][0][‘value’]
?>
Drupal 8
<?php 
# Consistent Drupal 8 code.
$node->get(‘title’)->value
$node->get(‘body’)->value
?>

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Conﬁguration and Content Entities
Nearly anything you can create more than one of in Drupal 8 has been converted to an
entity. There are two kinds of these entities:
From a developer point of view it means that between the Entity 
API and the Configuration/State API, there is almost never a reason to create and
manage your own database tables by hand in Drupal 8.

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Web Services
A major focus for Drupal 8 is a native REST API built into Drupal 8 and supported by the
RESTful Web Services suite of modules.
These enable Drupal 8 to produce and consume web services for the creation of Drupal-
powered mobile applications, facilitate cross-site communication, and allow better
integration with third-party resources.
The Drupal 8 REST API allows for fine-grained configuration of which resources should be
available (nodes, taxonomy, users, and so on), what HTTP methods are allowed against
those resources (for example, GET, POST, PATCH, DELETE), and which formats and
authentication are used to access those resources.
The contributed REST UI module provides an interface for this configuration. You can
define which role(s) on your site may access resources via each allowed HTTP method.
Drupal 8 ships with the Guzzle PHP HTTP library, which gives us easy syntax to
retrieve and post data to Drupal or to talk to third-party Web Services, such as
Twitter or Github.

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Improved Caching
Caching in Drupal 8 has been greatly improved across the board.
Entity cache module is now in core,
and Drupal Cache is based on Cacheability Metadata
All things that either are directly renderable or are used to determine what to render
provide cacheability metadata — ranging from access results to entities and URLs.
Cacheability metadata consists of 3 properties:
cache tags
For dependencies on data managed by Drupal, like entities & configuration
cache contexts
For variations, i.e. dependencies on the request context
cache max-age
For time-sensitive caching, i.e. time dependencies

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Big Pipe
Activating the experimental BigPipe Module in Drupal 8.1 core improves the user
experience for your site visitors by reducing the perceived page loading time.
Drupal 7 can’t really cache its output because it lacks metadata for caching. In
Drupal 7 (and just about every other CMS or framework), personalization has always
made things run slower.
Using BigPipe in Drupal 8, it is no longer so. Drupal 8 includes cacheability metadata
and knows which parts of every page are static and which dynamic. BigPipe then
sends the unchanging parts of a page to the browser immediately while rendering
and delivering the dynamic parts later, as soon as 
they are ready.
Essentially, your site visitors see what they came to see almost immediately—the
main content and images, for example—while the uncacheable, personalized
page elements (such as a shopping cart block) are delivered once rendered.

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Building ModulesDrupal 8
Acquia - Building modules with Drupal 8
What is needed:
• Understanding of programming in PHP
• Familiarity with object-oriented programming (OOP) terminology
◦ Lesson 1 - Examples module, Symfony, Controllers, and the Menu
◦ Lesson 2 - Blocks, Configuration, and Forms
◦ Lesson 3 - Configuration forms and management
◦ Lesson 4 - Entities, Content Entities, and Configuration Entities
◦ Lesson 5 - Fields for entities
◦ Lesson 6 - Entity queries and loading entities
◦ Lesson 7 - Loading and editing fields
◦ Lesson 8 - Services, dependency injection, and service containers
◦ Lesson 9 - Creating Elements, Theming Elements, and Managing Front-end Libraries
◦ Lesson 10 - Unit and Functional Testing
◦ Lesson 11 - Review of Dependency Injection
(source: Acquia Website)

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Preparing for Drupal 8Drupal 8
Here are several additional recommendations and procedures that you can
use to prepare for Drupal 8's release:
• Prepare your codebase for newer versions of PHP
• Use object-oriented programming whenever possible
• Implement autoloading
• Move from features to configurations
• Use Composer
• Take advantage of Twig
• Use an improved authoring experience backported from Drupal 8
What version of Drupal core should I use?
How can I build a Drupal 8-friendly website using Drupal 7?

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Migration PathDrupal 8
Drupal’s major version upgrade path has been replaced with a migration
path, courtesy of a D8 port of the Migrate and Migrate Drupal-to-Drupal
modules.
As of Drupal 8.1, there is also a Migration UI in core, which allows major
Drupal version migrations without resorting to command-line tools. Both a
migration path from Drupal 6 (already in Drupal 8.x) and Drupal 7 (partially
in 8.x and under development) are supported.
Migrate to Drupal 8: A How-To Scan (Oct 2016)
Upgrade using the migration user interface
Issues for Drupal Core - Migration
Useful resources:
Automated upgrading to Drupal 8

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Deciding When to UpgradeDrupal 8
The Drupal 8 Contrib Porting Tracker is a "centralized place for
tracking the porting status of contributed projects." Basically, it's
a Kanban board where you can check the upgrade status of a
given Drupal module and/or you can provide additional
information about projects for the community.
https://contribkanban.com/board/contrib_tracker
Supporting Tools (Modules Upgrade)
Upgrade Status is a Drupal module that you can add to your site to collect
information about the modules’ update status.
D8upgrade is a free Web service that makes it as easy as possible to generate an
upgrade report of your site.
Drupal Project Usage Graph

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Drupal 8 Using Composer and GIT
GIT
•Using Composer in a Drupal project
•Up and running a Drupal 8 project  
using Composer and GIT
$ cd /sites
$ sudo composer create-project drupal-composer/drupal-project:8.x-dev 
my-drupal-site --stability dev --no-interaction
To create a new Drupal project using Composer, type the following on the
command line, where /sites/my-drupal-site is the desired code location:

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Drupal Using Composer
•through Drupal.org
•through Drupal Packagist
Using Composer to install Drupal packages
To install Drupal modules or themes for your site with composer, enter
the following command at the root of your Drupal install:
$ composer require drupal/<modulename>
https://packagist.drupal-composer.org

From Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 - Drupal Intensive Course Overview

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