We're digging into our first dry-run migrations from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8, and learning a lot about what's ready and what's not. And there's some surprises in there...

I'm sure many of you reading this may have heard that Drupal 8 has been released, may have even received some marketing emails.

Today marks the release of Drupal 8, and the birthday of its founder, Dries Buytaert. This release is more than just a new digit, it's an entirely new platform with something for everyone to love, but it's particularly big for web site owners.

What's the big deal? The biggest, most powerful, one of the most successful open source projects in the world has two major, fundamental changes that change everything you thought you knew about it.

Well, not everything. Lots of the things that people love about Drupal are getting some nice improvements:

Here are the slides from my 2015 Drupal Summit talk, Quality Drupal DevOps!

You can also click here to open in a new window, full screen.

Drupal 8 has only 4 critical issues before getting released out of beta! Fingers crossed for a release this week!

Faster, more secure, more maintainable. Three nice benefits we get from our new standard Drupal server architecture.

We hear it all the time:

Why do you recommend a 6 hour budget for a simple integration? Here's an embed widget right here -- if this were WordPress I could do it myself!

Well, in Drupal you can do it yourself, exactly the same way you might in WordPress. Add a block, use an input format that doesn't strip out Javascript, paste in your code, put the block where you want it on your page, and away you go.

More and more I keep running into assertions that Git is a version control tool, and that if you use it for deployment, you're doing it wrong.

Why?

At Freelock we find it to be a very effective deployment tool, and I'm not seeing a solution that meets our needs any better.

Two presentations in particular caught my attention recently mentioned this:

For many years, we've organized our development around user stories. What exactly is each user trying to accomplish, and what does that look like when they try to accomplish those tasks?

Another sales call today, with a prospective start-upper who thought Drupal might lower his costs to get a web startup launched.