Thinkbean.com - Built with Drupal 8

Why Drupal 8?

The two main reasons we chose Drupal 8 were:

1. We love Drupal
2. We're just a little bit crazy

The first point is obvious, we really do love Drupal. We love what Drupal stands for; We love how it lets our clients do amazing things; We love mega-deep multi-dimensional arrays... (okay, not the last one so much).

Drupal 7 is still awesome but there’s a shiny, new version coming just around the corner. Drupal 8! It’s like Drupal 7 - only one better.:)

Drupal 8 is a complete rewrite of the Drupal CMS. It inherits all of the strength, flexibility, and scalability of the previous Drupal versions… but that’s where the similarities end. Over 200 new features and improvements have been built into Drupal 8. A few of our favorites are:

• Responsive Admin
• Decoupled Approach
• Accessibility Integration
• Web Services
• Inline Editing
• Views in Core
• Twig Templating
• Object Oriented Programming

It’s the last two items in that list that get me (as a developer) excited.

TWIG is a fast and secure template engine for PHP. It’s super quick, clean to write, and provides a clear separation between the back-end and front-end of a website. Find out more about TWIG here: http://twig.sensiolabs.org

Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with Drupal 8 allows us to develop websites using the latest techniques, patterns, and principles. It also allows Drupal to benefit from the greater PHP community and (this is important) contribute back to that community!

The second point, (the one about us being a little crazy) is part of what makes us push boundaries. Staying in the comfort zone just isn't that much fun for a creative agency. We like to play with new things; We like to break things and we love putting things back together so everything just works. Now, who was it who said "here's to the crazy ones"....?

We build Drupal 7 websites every day of the week. We decided to build our new site in Drupal 8 for a bunch of reasons... to learn new things, to explore, to experiment, etc. but, really, deep down we built our site in Drupal 8 because we thought it would be cool.

Challenges

Developing in Drupal 8 is very different than Drupal 7. There’s no arguing that fact. Every layer of site development is different.

Our front end developers needed to learn TWIG (which is nice and easy).

Our back end developers needed to forget about a million Drupal 7 ways of doing things and learn the new architecture (not as easy).

Strategy

Our team loves challenges. It’s one of the threads that ties us all together.

As a Drupal-only agency, we’ve been learning Drupal 8 for a couple years now... but no amount of training beats working on a real project. We jumped into D8 and bent the throttle as we sped up and over the learning curve, mastering the Symfony framework along the way. Drupal 8, quite intelligently, leverages several key components of Symfony - another, major reason why D8 is orders-of-magnitude beyond previous versions.

A totally typical learning process ensued. At first, we felt it was just weird and the old way was the best way. However, we quickly realized leveraging other great PHP components such as Symfony, Composer and PHPUnit meant we could develop sites faster, smarter, and better than before.

Results

We love our new site and learned a massive amount about working with Drupal 8 in the real world. Our site, like all good websites, is a continuous evolution - it is never truly ‘finished’. It will be realigned regularly to better achieve our business goals and meet the needs of our users.

Obviously Thinkbean is a fan of Drupal and we absolutely love working with Drupal 8. We’re sure you will, too.