In a new post to the Liip blog Lennart Jegge shares a "quick look" at the current state of the Drupal 8 project and some of the issues some people are having making the transition.

Eight months ago Drupal 8.0.0 was released. Exciting news for drupalists. Since then comparing D8’s features to its predecessor is a topic in daily business. "Can drupal 8 do what we can do now with 7 today?". After playing around with D8 i get the feeling some crucial features are missing.

He shares some of the features he sees as still missing (a Top 10 wishlist) and how it seems difficult to get a good overview of the Drupal 8 ecosystem. Some modules have yet to be updated and rewrites can be difficult given the major "under the covers" changes to Drupal itself.

In the end the importance of a variety of mature modules that play together nicely is crucial when it comes to efficiency, maintainability and stability of a project

In a new post to the Liip blog Karine Chor shares some helpful Drupal 8 debugging tips and things you can do to determine what you code is doing "under the covers".

It has been nearly 7 months since Drupal 8 first release and as a developer, I am still in the learning process. It can be hard sometimes to know what is going wrong with your code and how to solve it. I will tell you about few things to know on how to develop and debug Drupal 8 projects and continue learning, learning and learning !

Her tips cover topics like:

• Disabling cache
• Displaying errors
• Creating log messages
• Debugging Twig templates
• Profiling pages

The post ends with a section covering use of the the Drupal command line tool to provide even more real-time debugging functionality.

On the TutsPlus.com site today there's a new tutorial posted for the Drupal-ers out there showing you the right way to inject dependencies in a Drupal 8 application.

As I am sure you know by now, dependency injection (DI) and the Symfony service container are important new development features of Drupal 8. However, even though they are starting to be better understood in the Drupal development community, there is still some lack of clarity about how exactly to inject services into Drupal 8 classes.

They start by talking about how most of the current examples just show the static injection of dependencies but that that's not the only way. The article shows how to inject other services into existing services via a simple change to the service definitions. They also talk about "non-service classes" and injecting values there as well (including controllers, forms and plugins).

On the Liip blog there's a post from Jon Minder talking about the new Drupal 8 migration API/module and includes a guide to get you started using it in your Drupal application.

We at Liip AG believe, that the migration API is the best and most efficient way to import data into Drupal. [...] The Migrate 8 module in core is only an API. There is no user interface. This makes it difficult for new developer to start with Migrate 8.

I suggest you, to install the [several] extension modules right away before you start developing if you want to realize the full potential of migrate.

The post starts with a list of reasons they see to use the migration module over other methods including the fact that it's sponsored and supported by Acquia. He provides a list of modules to install before getting started with Migrate and links to a GitHub repository if you'd like a "quickstart" environment to follow his examples. He then compares the previous version (from Drupal 7) of the migration handling with the newer Drupal 8 functionality, most notably the change over to YAML configuration rather than PHP code. He helps you understand the structure of these files and gives an example. He shows how to run the migration, gives a more advanced JSON source example and mentions the included process plugin.

php[architect] magazine has released their latest issue for April 2016 - Off the Island: Drupal:

I’m excited to see the Drupal and PHP communities building bridges to collaborate (“Getting off the island” as Larry Garfield likes to say) and also learn from each other. This month, we’ll look at how the Drupal project has embraced tools and techniques like object-oriented programming and Composer.

This month's edition includes articles about:

• Drupal 8 Module Development
• Composer and Drupal 8
• Drupal Security & Vulnerability Management (this month's free article)
• Generating documentation from source code

As usual, the regular columns have come back for another edition - Community Corner, Security Corner, Education Station and Leveling Up. You can get a copy of this issue for your very own directly from the php[architect] site or pick up a yearly subscription while you're there.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted another in its series looking at Drupal 8 functionality today. In this latest post author Daniel Sipos looks at entity validation and typed data and what functionality the project provides over what was offered in previous versions (built on top of the Symfony validation component).

Data validation is a very important part of any application. Drupal 7 has a great Form API that can handle complex validation of submitted data, which can then be turned into entities. However, form level validation is problematic. [...] With the introduction of subsystems such as the REST API, Drupal 8 needed something better to handle this problem. [...] In this article, and its followup, we will explore the Drupal 8 Entity Validation API, see how it works, and how it can be extended.

He starts by looking at typed data and the consistency it provides in working with the metadata on objects. He includes a few examples of defining a string data type with a maximum length. He then applies this to content entities and enforcing the constraints provided by the types. In the next part of this series he'll look at the validation itself and how it works with these types/constraints.

Jeff Geerling has an interesting post to his site showing the results of some of his own testing around the performance of Drupal 8 versus Drupal 7...and that 8 comes out to be slower than 7. He also includes some of the things that the Drupal project is doing to help the situation.

When some people see reports of Drupal 8 being 'dramatically' slower than Drupal 7, they wonder why, and they also use this performance change as ammunition against some of the major architectural changes that were made during Drupal 8's development cycle.

First, I wanted to give some more concrete data behind why Drupal 8 is slower (specifically, what kinds of things does Drupal 8 do that make it take longer per request than Drupal 7 on an otherwise-identical system), and also why this might or might not make any difference in your choice to upgrade to Drupal 8 sooner rather than later.

He shares the results of some of his own benchmarking on a cluster (bramble) of Raspberry Pis for the requests per second on the standard setup for each version. He includes the output from an XHProf profiling run too, showing the large call stack on both sides, not just Drupal 8. He then talks about some of the Drupal 8 updates that are included to help mitigate some of these issues: architecture changes, easier caching, authenticated user handing and slow loading content management.

The SitePoint PHP blog has another post in its series about working with Drupal 8. In this new tutorial author Daniel Sipos talks about theming views in the content management system and introducing custom style plugins.

In this article, we are going to look at how we can create a custom Style plugin for Views in Drupal 8. We will use the Bootstrap tab markup as a goal and implement a tabbed output for our View results. In the View configuration, the Style settings will allow us to specify which field will be used as the tab navigation copy, leaving the rest of the fields shown in the respective tab panes. Basically, each View result will represent a tab – so this example is not suited for Views which have more than a few results. The main goal is to illustrate how we can create our own Views Style plugins in Drupal 8.

He starts by talking about Style plugins - what they are and where they fit in the application execution flow. He then walks you through the creation of the custom style plugin to integrate the Bootstrap tabs. This also includes the creation of the theme and the matching template to build out the tab markup.

In this tutorial on SitePoint.com author Daniel Sipos introduces you to the concepts behind the Migrate module in Drupal 8 and how it can be used to move content over from other sources.

Migrate is one of the most established modules in the Drupal ecosystem. So much so that with Drupal 8, a decision has been made to get some of its functionality ported and added to Drupal core. An important reason was that the traditional upgrade between major releases was replaced with a migration of Drupal 6 or 7 content and configuration to Drupal 8.

[...] In this article we are going to look at how migration works in Drupal 8 by migrating some content into node entities. For simplicity, the data we play with resides in tables in the same database as our Drupal installation.

He starts but outlining the "migration theory" and parts of the process to get the data in to your Drupal 8 instance: the source, the process and the destination. He uses a movie content example to show the setup needed to create the tables and define the configuration for the relationship to genres. He then shows how to make the migration configuration, defining the three parts and how to define the related migration classes. He ends the post with the drush command to execute the migration, get the current migration status and roll them back if something unexpected happens.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a tutorial posted for the Drupal users out there showing you how to use plugin derivatives effectively.

In this article we will explore the long answer to that and learn what derivates are and how we can use them. For the latter, we will build an example inside the demo module that can be found in this git repository and which should hopefully help us better understand what’s going on. For a slightly more complex example, the Menu system is great as it provides an individual block for each of its menus (similar to Drupal 7 but using plugins).

They're basically creating a system that allows the dynamic creation of Node Blocks for each of the article nodes but it's just an example of how (and not a recommendation on what you should do). They start in by talking about plugin derivatives - what they are and how they fit into the overall Drupal 8 code structure. The tutorial then shows the creation of the derivative class and explain each part of the code that makes it up. Following this is the other half of the functionality, is the block plugin class that will generate the instances of itself as requested.