By now you have likely heard quite a bit about Drupal 8. But do you have a good sense of when and why to make the switch?
Migrating to Drupal 8 will make new features and functionality available for your site and help you stay current with the latest best practices. But it will take time and effort, and may mean a bit of refactoring as well.
What’s new in Drupal 8?
Drupal 8 adds a number of helpful features into core, making it possible to build fully-featured websites out of the box. Drupal 8 takes care of basic needs, so contributed modules can be reserved for specialized functionality.
There are more than 200 new features in Drupal 8, including built-in support for multilingual and mobile-friendly sites, a simplified content authoring experience with in-place editing, native web services, Views integration into core, stronger HTML5 support and much more.
In addition, Drupal 8 is written in well structured, object-oriented PHP based on the Symfony framework. And it leverages the Twig templating system, making design patterns simpler, faster, more logical and more secure.
Once you are on Drupal 8, you can easily take advantage of minor releases that will add powerful functionality on a predictable schedule, without requiring you to reinvent your site. And the focus on backwards compatibility beginning with Drupal 9 means upgrading between major versions won’t be a massive headache like it has been with past versions of Drupal.
Time to switch?
There are a number of factors to consider when deciding on migrating to Drupal 8. In general, the sooner you can bring your site up to the most up-to-date standards, the better. But it’s also important to consider your objectives when deciding on the best time for an upgrade.
If the functionality in Drupal 8 would revolutionize the way you do business, or you are considering rolling out significant new functionality, now might be a good time to switch. But if your Drupal 7 site is running well and there aren’t any solid business reasons to make the switch, you may consider holding off until Drupal 9 becomes available.
To help clarify your decision, we’ve created a quiz to help you determine when it’s time to make the switch. You can also contact us if you want to talk through the options.
