Drupal 8 on Pantheon

• Mobile-first: Content looks beautiful on all devices, out of the box.

• New configuration management: Manage site configuration via version control: export, import, share and merge.

• A better authoring experience: Manage your content easily with the bundled CKEditor WYSIWYG editor and the ability to edit in-place.

• Views in Core: Customize all your views—the front page, listing blocks, admin pages, filters, and create your own custom listings without installing any additional code.

• Multilingual capabilities: Reach a global audience through translating with built-in user interfaces.

Drush and The Drupal Console

Drush and the Drupal Console are both command line tools that make administration and development tasks for Drupal websites much faster. In Drupal 8, these tools will improve your workflow by providing a wide arsenal of commands to speed up your ability to build and maintain sites. Learn how to install Drupal 8 and write a module in this introduction to Drush and Drupal Console by Greg Anderson.

Configuration Management 

Managing configuration is an important part of any multi-person website project. The tools available for Drupal 7 didn’t provide complete coverage of all configuration settings, but Drupal 8 has changed all of that. 

Drupal 8’s new configuration management system provides complete and consistent import and export of all config settings. Git already provides facilities for managing parallel work on different branches. When conflicts occur, you can back out the conflicting changes, take just the version provided in the central repository, or if neither of these alternatives are appropriate, use three-way merge tools to examine and manually resolve each difference. A new Drush project, config-extra, includes a config-merge command that streamlines the use of these tools. 

The team at Pantheon both contributed heavily to and sponsored work on config management. We expect it to be one of the major game-changers in Drupal 8. Learn more about Drupal 8 configuration on Pantheon.

New Options for Frontend

TWIG Templating

Twig replaced PHPTemplate in Drupal 8 as its default template engine. Part of the Symfony2 framework, Twig provides a lot of new functionality. It’s flexible and fast, allowing developers to create their own custom tags and filters and reduces the majority of overhead related to regular PHP code by compiling templates down to plain optimized PHP. Twig also comes with a sandbox mode to safely modify template design. It’s a developer-friendly templating engine that’s already being used in several popular open-source projects. Learn more about why Twig became the new template engine for D8.

Decoupled Architecture

Decoupled architecture has never been easier than with Drupal 8, which ships with a RESTful API built into Core. It lets frontend developers experiment with various JavaScript frameworks, iOS apps, or even other content management systems to be innovative with the UI but rely on Drupal’s powerful backend. Learn more about decoupled CMS.

Panels & Page Manager

Drupal 8 core is great for managing lots and lots of content. Users can choose new Content types, add arbitrary Fields, and then create endless pieces of content of that type. However, when it comes to creating one­-off landing pages or applying custom layouts, Panels and Page Manager are still the way to go.

The Panels module gives Drupal site administrators the ability to create customized layouts for various uses. Its drag and drop interface allows users to visually design a page layout and organize content within it. The architecture of Panels in Drupal 8 is largely the same as in Drupal 7, with some shifting in certain functionality and module responsibility. Learn more >

Drupal 8 Case Studies

• ​Forum One + Fairfax County Public Schools: Learn why Forum One relies on Pantheon to help administer FCPS’ large network of individual school sites using Pantheon and Drupal 8. The check out this post for the details on how Pantheon's custom upstreams made this project possible. 

• Last Call Media + Rainforest Alliance: Learn how Last Call Media built a complex Drupal 8 site for the Rainforest Alliance, using agile workflows on Pantheon to beat time and resource constraints.

• Palantir + The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco needed the ability to spin up unique microsites for museum exhibits to extend the experience beyond museum walls. Learn how and why they chose to do so with Drupal 8 on Pantheon. 

• Chapter Three + HDR: Learn how architecture company HDR upgraded their outdated site to a global web presence with faster performance and room to grow, using Drupal 8 on Pantheon.

Drupal 8 Documentation

• Major Version Drupal Upgrades: Instructions on how to upgrade your Pantheon site to the next major version of Drupal.

• Using GitHub Pull Requests with Composer, Circle CI, and Drupal 8: This guide describes how to use build tools such as GitHub and CircleCI with Composer to implement a collaborative, team-based Continuous Integration workflow using Pull Requests for Drupal 8 sites on Pantheon. 

• PhpStorm for Composer Managed Drupal 8 Sites: Learn how to configure JetBrains PhpStorm for Pantheon sites managed with Composer using a GitHub Pull Request workflow.

• Configuration Workflow for Drupal 8 Sites: Configure your Drupal site's performance and caching settings to make significant improvements.

• Drupal Commerce on Drupal 8: Use Composer to Install Drupal Commerce with Drupal 8.