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Whenever you’re trying to fill your day up with gaming, a gaming magazine can go a long way to accomplishing that. In this case, we have issue 23 of Game Nite. It’s free, as always, so there’s really no reason to not go pick up your copy now! In this issue: Issue #23 of Game […]

Like many other Drupallers, I'm in Nashville this week. Unlike previous DrupalCons, I'm less excited about being here than previous year. While my team at the University of Colorado Boulder currently manages 1000 D7 sites, it looks increasingly less likely that we'll be upgrading to D8.

Angela “Herder of Cats” Byron recently tweeted...

OK, time for our semi-annual poll/group therapy session. ;)

What are the 5 top things you or your clients run into problems with on #Drupal 8?

— webcsillag (@webchick) March 9, 2018

The last time she tweeted this, we responded with a few specific issues we had at the time. After maintaining a handful of D8 sites in production for a few months and meeting with 20+ developers and designers from teams at all campuses in the University of Colorado system earlier this year, we now have a more comprehensive list to answer the question of why the University of Colorado Boulder isn't moving forward with updating the Express install profile to D8.

We've already written and presented about some of these, but my goal at DrupalCon is to find people who will convince me that we're wrong or point out what we're missing. I can't emphasize this enough that we really want to be proven wrong and pointed in the right direction about some of these so we can stop evaluating options other than D8:

• When running 1000 sites, D8 requires much more CPU and memory resources to render the same HTML output as D7. Because D8's core can't be run from symlinks, it doesn't support atomic deployments or efficient opcode caching when running 1000 copies of the same codebase. This leaves traditional multisite or containers as options. Multisite's limitations are well known. Containers add complexity and require more resources that provide little benefit when running Drupal as a service.
• D8 seems slower than D7 or other PHP alternatives. Everything from updating with Composer, menu routing, and editing pages. While this isn't as much of an issue for users browsing the sites since the output is cached and served by Varnish, the slow renders are very noticeable to editors and developers.
• Install profile inheritance is still unstable. Despite 6 years of development, being included in popular D8 distributions like Lightning, and Dries blogging about it, it is unclear this core patch will ever be committed. Acquia drove the patch in a different direction for over a year trying to make a base profile's dependencies optional. When we suggested making the Umami demo a sub-profile of Standard, it became clear how few members of the core team knew anything about profile inheritance or supported updating core to support it.
• Our experience with highly promoted D8 "successes" like Webform wasn’t great. The D7 version of Webform reports more than > 440K installs. The D8 version, ~32K reported installs. This isn't a criticism of @jrockowitz or the Webform code. He is doing amazing work, but we felt the lack of a larger base of developers contributing fixes and extending Webform when working with Webform and Views.
• The lack of license compatibility with 2 of the 3 most popular licenses off the island (Apache-2.0 and GPL-3.0) is a dead end. This is related to @jrockowitz's repeated attempts to find away to give work away while earning a living developing for Drupal. Drupal's strict GPL policies now seem to stifle development vs. encouraging it when compared to the more balanced approach taken by projects like WordPress.
• D8’s Layout Initiative isn’t a good match for how we currently manage Drupal as a service. Now that the dust has settled on 8.5.0, we'll post more on this soon.
• We're finding fewer well-maintained contrib projects. While using contrib projects can be golden handcuffs that only get you 80% of a solution with options and assumptions you end up fighting against in the end, we've mastered the embrace and customized/extend/contribute back approach. We rely heavily on contrib and actively contribute back. We maintain or co-maintain projects used by more than 100K D7 sites. When we find fewer D8 contributions to meet even 80% or our needs, it makes less sense to develop our own solutions for Drupal than a leaner, faster framework.
• The "let's throw everything in core" approach results in an increase in critical security releases for code we aren't using. This is an issue in environments with distributed development, systems, networking and security teams, where a security team is periodically scanning for known vulnerabilities with tools like Qualys, Arachni or Nessus. With something like sa-core-2018-001, these scans don't care that the Comments module is disabled or even deleted. They scan the code looking for anything less than Drupal 8.4.3 and report that the entire code base is a security issue. We can respond to the issue by explaining that it is mitigated by X, but that fact remains that more code in core will likely translate to more staff time applying security updates to 1000+ sites. Ideas like what @davidhernandez suggested package Drupal both framework (essential core) and product (core) aren't getting the same attention from the DA as demos and other improvements to attract non-technical users to Drupal. LTS support services offered for D6 aren't really enough since they aren't altering the code fingerprint that the security scans are looking for.

I wish moving from D7 to D8 was an obvious move for us. It would make my job much easier. After watching the normal stability requirements ignored to sneak Umami into 8.5 and realizing that the initiatives DA was promoting for core (automatic updates, project browser, telemetry and in site announcements from the DA) are NOT features we'd use in our service, it's becoming increasingly clear our needs no longer align with what is driving the priorities of the Drupal project. When I evaluate D8 through the Umami demo, it's clear that we aren't even the target audience for what the project wants to highlight to people evaluating it. When we evaluate a framework, product or service, part of what we evaluate is the cost to maintain. When fatal errors are acceptable in a demo after a core update, we question whether we'll be able to easily apply upgrades if the developers most familiar with this framework can't upgrade the demo?

The Express install profile we've developed and use at multiple campuses is the 5th most popular D7 distribution on Drupal.org.

It's not that the entire University of Colorado system is against D8 either. Both the University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS) and Auraria Library are both using D8, but for very different use cases than the Web Express service we offer for free on the Boulder campus.

UCCS is moving from Ingeniux to D8. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Ingeniux, it is a XML/XLST static site generator with limited features for dynamic content.  UCCS initial D8 offering has similar limitations to Ingeniux, but they are leveraging Migrate to move sites from Ingeniux to Drupal very quickly.  They are also hosting their Drupal 8 sites themselves on the most advanced server architecture within the CU system which well set them up well to add new features in the future.

Auraria Library is another high profile D8 site.  This site has more features and functionality than the UCCS sites, but it also has a small development team supporting a small group of content editors and is hosted on Pantheon.

While D8 makes sense for both of these use case, neither of these groups had insights on how we could overcome what we think are D8's short comings for the ~1000 sites we manage for the University of Colorado Boulder.

While I'd prefer to continue maintaining D7 sites while developing new projects in D8, the lack of clarity from the DA around the EOL of D7 is forcing us to invest time in evaluating alternatives now. When I read that Symfony 4.1's router is now the fastest PHP router, I get both excited and terrified. I'm excited since, in some ways, this would prove everyone that pushed to get off the island and collaborate with the larger PHP community right. I'm terrified because I realize that Drupal going from Symfony 3 to Symfony 4 most likely means D8 to D9. If D9 means the end of support for D7 and quarterly justification for running software our security team views as insecure, we have to go all in on a direction other than D8 soon.

We've spent some time trying to answer the question, "if not Drupal, then what?" If we can't figure out how to make D8 work for us, I'll post more about what we found when evaluating alternatives to D8. This week, I'm focused on trying to make D8 work well when hosting Drupal as a Service in higher ed.

If you see me at DrupalCon, PLEASE change my view. I won't be hard to spot.

I've started a thread on r/drupal/ for everyone who's not at DrupalCon.

Developer Blog

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In a far-off distant dystopian future, the resistance is fight back against an oppressive government. Such a situation is actually a gold mine for criminals. The chaos and confusion is just the sort of place where you can get away with a lot and nobody is the wiser. That’s where you find yourself in Nexus, […]

As I was expecting, Wednesday took its dear, sweet time. I remember looking at the clock after having done some proofing of a couple articles and working on some product sheets and going, “wait… it’s only 10:30am? How!?!” Ah well, it did eventually end, and it included going to that Brazilian place I’ve mentioned before […]

Experts from the Amazon GameLift team take an informative deep-dive into the architecture of cross-platform multiplayer games. ...

Shattered Tower is a new Myth Punk RPG that’s up on Kickstarter now. The system is entirely new, as is the setting. The Kickstarter campaign looks to fund the main rulebook, along with several adventure modules to get you going and adventuring right away. From the campaign: Welcome Fearless Adventurer, We’re extremely proud to get […]

The next in the list of figures from the Exiles set, the end result of the Union in Chains event, is Veteran Hemlocke. She was originally being fought over by the Hunters and the Morticians, but that changed when Veteran Minx came on the scene. As such, Hemlocke is trading in for all-goth gear and […]

Archona Games has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new edition of their Small Star Empires game. In it, players are looking to spread out among the stars, grabbing the best systems for themselves, placing bases and colonies as they go. In the end, the player with the most points wins. The Kickstarter isn’t just […]

 

Drupal Commerce 2 shipping module let you quickly add and configure various shipping methods for your site. Out-of-the-box, you can easily set up basic shipping methods for flat-rate per-order or per-item shipping options. The plug-in based system allows for more advanced shipping integrations with suppliers for real-time rate calculation.

In this Acro Media Tech Talk video, we user our Urban Hipster Commerce 2 demo site to show you just how easy it is to create a simple flat-rate shipping fee for your eCommerce store. We set it up and then run through the checkout so that you can see exactly what your customers would see.

Its important to note that this video was recorded before the official 2.0 release of Drupal Commerce useing a beta release of the Commerce Shipping module. You may see some differences between this video and the current releases. The documentation is also evolving over time.

Urban Hipster Commerce 2 Demo site

This video was created using the Urban Hipster Commerce 2 demo site. We've built this site to show the adaptability of the Drupal 8, Commerce 2 platform. Most of what you see is out-of-the-box functionality combined with expert configuration and theming.

More from Acro Media

• How Drupal Commerce 2.x is Creating a Stronger Shipping Architecture
• Shipping Price Matrix: A Drupal Commerce module for Shipping Costs
• Watch more Tech Talk how-to videos
• Learn more about Acro Media

Drupal modules in this demo

• Drupal Commerce
• Commerce Shipping
• Official Drupal Commerce Documentation

Vikings are known for their fighting prowess, and also their desire for glory. When they die, they want to die in battle and be celebrated in Valhalla for the mighty deeds they’ve done. In Endless Pass, players take on the role of vikings fighting against a never-ending stream of monsters, as well as one-another. The […]

A brief discussion of the legal aspects of the recent lawsuit filed by PUBG's creator vs NetEase, one of China's largest largest internet technology companies.

The ability to craft elaborate game spaces and grown over this past decade, and we're going to talk about how it has given way to two different schools of thought for design.

Formazing helps you to create easily custom forms and add it as fields into your content

Battlefront has some big updates over on their website. They’re sending out the next set of figures for the Armoured Fist book for Flames of War. Those are the Valentine tank, as well as the Priest and Daimler armored vehicles. Then, over for Team Yankee, they’ve got two book previews up. The first is for […]

The Dropsolid Purger module enables you to invalidate caches in multiple varnish loadbalancers.

This module is a rework of the Acquia purge module to be usable on every environment. So the initial code should be credited to nielsvm

This module uses the Purge module

The Slaask module integrates the Slaask chat JavaScript into your Drupal site.

Requirements

This module requires no other modules.

Installation

Clone the repo into the "modules" folder of your site.

git clone https://github.com/slaaskhq/drupal-slaask.git cd drupal-slaask

See here for further information.

You may already know that we've been providing Drupal 6 Long-Term Support (D6LTS) for over two years.

What we have been hearing over and over lately - especially at Drupalcon - is "what about Drupal 7?"

Typically, only two major versions of Drupal are supported at once: the latest version, and the previous one. Right now, that means Drupal 7 and Drupal 8.

We don't know when the community's support for Drupal 7 will end or if the community itself will do some kind of LTS. But we do know that community support will come to end at some point. While the details will depend on what the community does, we just wanted to let everyone know...

We intend to provide Long-Term Support for Drupal 7, in order to keep your site going long after the end of official support!

Read more to learn more about our plans for D7LTS...

If you want a lot of 80s nostalgia all thrown into your RPGs all at once, Lasers & Liches is the game for you. Along with the aforementioned lasers and litches, there’s laser swords, pizza monsters, nuclear waste, and all other manner of things. But it’s not just haphazardly thrown in. It’s done with care […]