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This article is already a little outdated and may contain information that no longer corresponds to the current status of the topic.
Anyone who has moved to a town in the south of Germany and is not one of the long-established residents is "neigschmeckt". I am a "Reingeschmeckter" in Drupaldingen. I have been realizing web projects with Drupal 6,7 and 8 since 2013, but without coding myself. Rather, I am the typical case of a developing user who exploits the configuration possibilities of Drupal and suitable modules to develop powerful web solutions for customers in the publishing industry.
Publishing database and workflow management system with Drupal 6
My first contact with the CMS dates back to 2012, when I tested the Drupal 6 distribution OpenAtrium as a possible solution for a publishing intranet. Although the company intranet did not materialize, I discovered that OpenAtrium had an engine under the "hood" with the Drupal CMS that could do much more.
The following year, Drupal came into play as a candidate for an overarching publishing project: a group of publishers was planning a joint, biannual catalog of new publications for the book trade. The titles to be included were to be entered into a decentralized database at each publishing house and the joint printed catalog was to be created every six months using a process that was as automated as possible. Although more of a database project than a website project, the decision was made in favor of Drupal - primarily because of the associated expansion options.
These options also soon came into play when one of the publishers needed a workflow management system for the inclusion of titles in the publishing program, including a corresponding online review process, as a "preliminary stage" to the catalog that has since been implemented. This system could be easily built with Drupal before the data aggregation for the book trade catalog, so that the resulting complete system could map the entire (sometimes several years long) path of a title from the first internal considerations of the publisher to the acceptance and review process to its announcement for the book trade. Thanks to Drupal and around 50 helpful modules, the development time was just over six months, and not a single line of code had to be written.
Lexicon editorial system with Drupal 7
After the positive experience with Drupal, the CMS was also used in subsequent projects, but then in the newer version 7. For example, Drupal 7 has been in use since 2016 as an editorial system for an encyclopaedia project with several thousand articles and over 400 authors, whereby a multi-level workflow and complex authorization requirements also had to be mapped here. Once the authors' online contributions have been edited by the editorial team and approved by the editors, they are made available in XML form from Drupal for typesetting the printed encyclopaedia. The development time for this was only 3 months, also in this case solely through the use of Drupal Core and suitable modules.
Drupal 6 to Drupal 8
When Drupal 6 reached the end of its lifetime in 2016, the publishing workflow management system had continued to grow and several interfaces had been added. As Drupal 8 was released in November 2015, the decision was made to skip Drupal 7 and update the system to Drupal 8 straight away. The Drupal 8 version made a mature and stable impression and it was clear that the path would have to lead to Drupal 8 sooner or later anyway.
Composer, Drush and yaml
However, there were a few hurdles to overcome during this changeover: Firstly, it quickly became clear that development using only the Drupal interface was now at an end. Without Composer and Drush, it was no longer possible. In addition, the content of the Drupal 6 installation had to be migrated. The yaml migration scripts created with the Drupal Migrate modules had to be reworked in numerous places, also to make some improvements to the data structure in the course of the migration. Finally, it was important to use the new configuration management of Drupal 8 and to develop a deployment workflow tailored to it. In all of this, Drupal 8 proved to be a mature and very stable system that is significantly more demanding to handle than the previous versions, but which repays this with enhanced performance and functionality.
Integration of extension modules
The integration of external modules proved to be more complex than in Drupal 6. Despite the inclusion of some Drupal 6 modules in the Drupal 8 core, there were still almost 50 that had to be integrated into the new Drupal 8 solution. Due to the far-reaching technical changes in Drupal 8, module customization was often time-consuming for developers. In some cases - such as the intensively used Rules module - there were (still) no usable successor solutions available for Drupal 8. Suitable replacement solutions therefore had to be found. However, the replacement modules (e.g. Business Rules instead of Rules) were often still in the development process. Therefore, extensive testing, bug reporting, fixing and patching were required. While the original Drupal 6 installation had managed without any patches, patch management under Drupal 8 developed into a task area with its own weight. In most cases, it was possible to count on the support of the Drupal community, even if the project development was delayed in some places due to the dependency on external modules.
A backup for all eventualities
This dependency finally became critical with a module that was intended for an important function but showed errors during testing and was no longer maintained by the maintainer. Without in-house coding expertise, this is of course an exclusion criterion. Fortunately, arocom was on hand as a partner who not only took over the correction and adaptation of this module, but also supported the switch to Drupal 8 in many other areas. The willingness to cooperate in this way with an otherwise independent developer is anything but a matter of course and deserves special thanks. Anyone using Drupal 8 today as a user developer should definitely have such a partner with coding expertise in the background in order to be prepared for all eventualities.
Dr. Bertram Salzmann works as an e-publishing consultant for media companies and is the owner of Publishing Future GmbH.
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