As Drupal 8 picks up steam as the CMS of choice for building “ambitious digital experiences”, it is important to be prepared with the right resources to do your most ambitious work. Below are a selection of some of my favorite tools and guides for Drupal 8 development. Each one should help you on your way to Drupal 8 excellence.
Today we’re happy to announce that Multizone Failover is available for Pantheon Elite sites. While we can’t prevent disasters from happening, Pantheon has architected a high-availability (HA) solution with intelligent failover at the Global CDN edge layer to keep mission critical websites online in the event of a complete datacenter outage.
PHP is going through a renaissance, and a big part of it is the Composer package manager, which makes it easy to share common libraries of code between projects.
One of the most commonly documented ways for a PHP command line tool to be installed is via the composer global require command. This command is easy to document and easy to run, which explains its popularity. Unfortunately, this convenient function has a darker side that can cause some pretty big problems. The root of the problem is that Composer, by design, manages dependencies on a per-project basis; however, the global command installs everything into a common central project.
Today we’re happy to announce PHP 7.3 is the default version for new WordPress and Drupal 8 sites! Speed up your existing site by applying the 1-click update from your Pantheon site dashboard. You can update with confidence using Pantheon’s Dev, Test, Live workflow because PHP version is managed in version control and deployed along with the rest of your code. If for some reason you want to keep using a different version, you can override via pantheon.yml.
Let’s start this blog post about Drupal training in an unconventional way: by talking about how much I like WordPress.
Composer has helped quite a lot in the area of installation and dependency management for Drupal and Drush; however, users who want to get a quick start with Drush are sometimes put off by the Composer-based install. As of the Drush 8.0.0-rc3 release, it is now possible to install Drush using a phar. This requires fewer steps than the previous method.
[Related] Applying Updates to Drupal Core on Patheon with Drush
Pantheon is pleased to bring Drush 10 to the platform. Drush 10 is the latest version of the venerable command line tool that has been helping streamline Drupal tasks for well over a decade. If you’re new to Drush, there are a lot of things you can do with it, from one-off cache clears to scripting configuration management as part of continuous integration. Even if you don’t use Drush, you may find it interesting to know that Pantheon relies on it behind-the-scenes for several workflow operations.
Our idea of delivering Drupal as a service is starting to catch on as people realize just what it could mean for the project’s ability to expand. But the notion of “SaaSifying” open-source tools isn’t new, and actually we think the traditional model is kind of broken.
We get questions almost every day about Drupal multisite. In our experience, Drupal multisite does not meet the needs of organizations looking for a successful technology solution to manage dozens/hundreds/thousands of websites.
For anyone new to the terminology, a multisite is where you set Drupal up to connect to different databases depending on the incoming url, which allows one instance of Drupal to serve different sites under different domain names.