Emotive discussions have been and are being held about Drupal8, Symfony2 and "all that" in various forums and blogs. Examples can be found here and just this weekend here. The latter coincides with the sad withdrawal from D8 core by two "hero" contributors to both D8 core and contrib.
Which just goes to show that D8 and the end of the old Drupal Way is a real and present topic in the Drupal community. And so it should be.
But this piece today is not about more of that. This piece is about light at the end of the tunnel, creating that light and making it shine.
As D8 core is being "polished" it is so exciting to find that already some seriously good D7 modules are receiving some seriously good D8 treatments. Hell, if we can all chip in and accelerate the pace, then by the time D8 is officially released, we may consider launching some of our next Drupal projects in D8 in early 2014!
Want an example? Here's one.
At flink we love maps. Especially maps driven by Leaflet JS, the mobile-optimised Javascript library that allows you to produce in Drupal a variety of maps (including Bing, Google, Esri, Stamen, Mapbox), without forcing you to embrace more heavy-weight and/or more complicated solutions, like Google API or OpenLayers.
So we had a look at what D8 offers today in terms of maps.
Guess what? An easy mapping solution, including coordinate entry & storage, markers with info balloons, state & country borders, 20+ map canvasses and beautifully animated marker clustering is available for you to use in D8 today (see screenshot)!
Thanks to the work of developers and maintainers in both the core and contrib spaces, you can test-drive your next mapping project now, and be confident it will be production-ready in a few months.
Modules required for mapping that are available in D8 now are:
- Views, now part of core
- Geofield, for the entry and storage of points, lines and polygons
- Leaflet, the Drupal bridge to Leaflet JS
- Leaflet More Maps, includes Leaflet Demo, which showcases 2 dozens of maps available to you on your Drupal site, also available live here
- Leaflet MarkerCluster, beautiful animated clustering of location markers on your map
If you haven't used these modules before, why not take them for a spin while test-driving D8 core at the same time?
As you can see from the image on the right (snaphot taken18 Aug 2013) the question is not whether we Drupalers have a long road ahead before we can use D8 to its full capacity. It is obvious that road is long. The question is: how fast can we travel? If we all help support the contrib space, it may grow wings and D8 as a viable platform may take off sooner than we all thought.
At flink, while working on our own ports and other D8 contributions, we will continue to keep an eye on how D8 contrib progresses. Expect more on this later. See you soon!
Comments
Thanks for putting out a
Thanks for putting out a positive article when there's a lot of FUD about.
And thanks for your work on D8 contrib modules already.
Interesting image. Just
Interesting image. Just wondering whether you take out modules that have been included in core now, with views on top of course. But you could also more or less take out ctools as plugins is in (granted, there's much more in there, I know), but also small ones like say 'view modes'.
And kudos for porting geofield, good to see that a field api field is being ported - even though there still might be some API changes in the near future, especially for the field types.
Rad! Leaflet in Drupal 8 already!
Thank you so much for porting all of those modules over! I recently started to use Leaflet, Geofield, More Maps, and Marker cluster and am about to build a huge map for a client who is thrilled about it :)
Have you looked at IP Geolocation Views & Maps?
IPGV&M - absolutely
I definitely am using IPGV&M too :) I just didn't mention it because you didn't mention it in your article :) On that note, I also use Geophp and Addressfield. Soon, I'll try out using Slide with Style and Views Contextual Range Filter too. Cheers!
You're such a groupie!