The arrival of Drupal 8 marks a turning point for Drupal and content management systems (CMS) in general. With version 8, the designers of Drupal have improved upon their past offerings and made a genuine attempt to address concerns that users had with previous Drupal iterations. While there are many positive improvements, Drupal 8 still leaves issues to be addressed with future releases.
Drupal 8; the Pros.
The first and most obvious benefit of using Drupal 8 is the very robust and active Drupal developer community. With over 1 million active users, finding inspiration, help and support as a Drupal developer is extremely easy. Developers who migrate to Drupal 8 can expect limited downtime and frustration; the same cannot be said for other CMS offerings.
Perhaps the greatest benefit of Drupal 8 is its extreme extensibility. Drupal 8 developers start with a blank state and proceed to define their sites in their own terms. Even absolute beginners can build sophisticated data structures in a relatively short amount of time. Because of this, ideas can be rapidly prototyped in Drupal 8; saving developers time and money. Prototypes go up in moments and can then be fleshed out. Build outs can use existing Drupal modules or developers can create entirely new modules on their own.
Drupal 8 Encourages Fast Prototyping.
Drupal 8 continues and expands on Drupal’s reputation as being one of the most rapid development CMS environments on the market. Drupal 8 makes it entirely possible for developers to go from idea to fully functioning website within a matter of days. In fact, many Drupal 8 developers find themselves able to complete sophisticated projects in a matter of hours.
Drupal 8 Provides Rapid and Comprehensive Security Updates.
The greatest website is useless if it isn’t secure. With millions of hackers trawling the web for vulnerabilities to exploit, security is increasingly becoming more challenging. Drupal 8 meets these security needs. In addition to an active community, Drupal maintains an internal security team and has been known to patch exploits within hours of their discovery.
Drupal 8 users can subscribe to Drupal’s security update emails to get instant updates about current security issues. With over 1.3 million active users (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal), chances are good that most users will never experience significant security problems.
Drupal 8 the Cons
Of course no software is perfect and this includes Drupal. While Drupal 8 is constantly revised, improved and updated, there are issues that developers should be aware of when choosing Drupal.
Drupal 8 is Resource Hungry.
The flexibility and scalability of Drupal come with a trade off; Drupal can use a lot of system resources when run unoptimized. Adding 3rd party modules can compound this problem; especially when using modules that have not been properly optimized before release. Drupal 8 can be tweaked to perform faster and consume fewer resources, but these tweaks may be beyond the ability of a typical developer.
Drupal Upgrades Can be Difficult.
With Drupal, it’s all about now; concentrating on the cutting edge means that legacy software often gets left behind. That’s not such a problem for developers of new sites. The problems occur when moving from one version Drupal to the latest version. These upgrades can be, and often are, slow and contentious.
Drupal 8 Takes Time to Learn
Don’t expect your past programming knowledge to help you when migrating to Drupal 8. While it’s a great CMS, Drupal often plays by it’s own rules. New users should expect a steep learning curve before being able to develop and roll out complex projects. Fortunately, Drupal has a great community of active developers to ask for advice and help from.
Fortunately, a drupal development company can help to rapidly implement Drupal 8 projects. They can take your Drupal 8 project from concept to reality no matter how complex the underlying work may be.
Drupal 8 Improves Upon Perfection
Drupal developers love it for its simplicity and ability to scale small sites into massive web enterprises. Drupal 8 builds on this in ways that should be familiar to anyone who has used past versions of the software. At the same time, Drupal 8 leaves the door open for new developers to experience all that Drupal has to offer.