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Four Kitchens is ready for Drupal 8!

2 Min. ReadDevelopment

Acquia has just announced their active support for Drupal 8 on their hosting platform. As Acquia Partners, we’ve been hard at work preparing for the upcoming Drupal 8 release.

Four Kitchens will continue to lead and innovate in the Drupal 8 era. In fact, our work in Drupal 8 has already begun: We are partnering with the World Bank to prepare the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) to move to Drupal 8, increasing site performance and creating a potential standard of excellence to be used throughout the entire organization.

Meanwhile, we are upgrading our products and modules to Drupal 8. We have developed D8 roadmaps for our products: Saucier, a headless Drupal framework built on Node.js; and Aquifer, a command-line interface that makes it easy to scaffold, build, test, and deploy Drupal websites. In partnership with Google Summer of Code, we upgraded the Site Audit module to work with Drupal 8 and prepare for the next generation of high-performance websites. We’re also porting the development module Generate Errors to Drupal 8 as well. Additionally, we created a Drupal 8 Practice Group at Four Kitchens to train our team, share experience, and develop best practices.

This week, we are presenting several talks at NYC Camp about headless Drupal 8, frontend frameworks, and content-as-a-service: Almost Headless Drupal 8, a session about Drupal 8 and Angular, and Getting Started with Meteor, which will focus on integrating Drupal 8 and Meteor. To see all the talks we have at this year’s NYC Camp check out this post on Fourword.

Some of the things we love about Drupal 8

  • First-class tools for rapidly creating semantic APIs
  • Robust, enterprise-ready development framework
  • Stable, focused, useful toolset out-of-the-box
  • Architectural changes that improve performance and decrease server load (check out this DrupalCon LA session for an analysis of Drupal 8 caching and practical examples of what’s to come)
  • Tight integration with widely adopted open-source projects such as Symfony
  • New source tree structure patterns to increase code portability (PSR4)
  • Modern version of PHP, which brings many low-level improvements
  • Twig templating engine allows for easier integrations with the latest frontend technologies and workflows
  • Confident deployment with integrated config management in code
  • Incremental release schedule provides institutional stability while allowing for faster release of new features
  • Ability to leverage modern package management tools to improve modularity, dependency tracking, and package versioning
  • Well-structured APIs for dealing with entities, routes, and other core parts of Drupal