Can I start building my drupal 8 theme? - drupal-8

Is the Drupal 8 template engine ready for a new development?
I plan to use Drupal 8, and since I will start first with the design, I want to know if the template engine (I understand it uses Twig) will suffer significative changes that doesn't make it a good choice to start now.

Drupal 8 is currently in Beta 1, and according to the Beta 1 release notes:
Drupal 8 beta 1 for designers, translators, and documentation writers
Drupal 8's user interface, interface text, and markup are not
finalized until the first release candidate, so it's too early to
focus on user-facing documentation, translations, or themes (though by
all means, adventurous contributors should start now to provide
feedback while we can still fix things). Note that localize.drupal.org
does not yet support the full Drupal 8 API and does not have all
translatable strings.
https://www.drupal.org/drupal-8.0.0-beta1

Drupal 8 is now released. If you're looking for a couple of theming how-to overviews we've written a couple:
Custom Drupal 8 Theme + Sass, Singularity, Breakpoint, LiveReload and Gulp and Kickstarting with Drupal 8 themes.
Hope you find them helpful!

Related

Want to use Drupal 8 for new product

I want to built my new product on Drupal 8, But I am not able to make my mind to use it b'coz of below mentioned points.
Drupal 8 is still in beta version
Many major modules for example {Libraries API, Token, Pathauto, Date, IMCE }are still in dev version and many more vital modules are still dev version.
Frequently release of Core updates.
The product I am planning is not simple content side it will have lot of dynamic things in it and e-commerce too.
Why I am looking towards Drupal 8 is, It's many new promising features, such as, symphony in base, mobile first, and many other new concept they have bring in core and obviously its a new upgraded version of Drupal.
Please give your suggestion whether should I start it with Drupal 7 or Drupal 8
I would love to see answers from people who know Drupal better than me as well.
The only thing I would add is: please have in mind the pain and suffering moving from Drupal 7 to 8 later on. The changes between the 2 are drastic and it will be hard to change your mind once the site in online.

Adding custom application in sitecore 7.2

I was trying to find layout Studio to create a custom App in sitecore 7.2, but couldnt find it. Did anyone try any customization in sitecore 7.2.
I think this is now referred to as the Developer Center.
Sitecore Start Button > Development Tools > Developer Center
I wouldn't recommend using this if you have access to other development tools that are more suited to the task To be honest I'm surprised Sitecore have kept this feature in the product.
I am not sure what you mean with Layout Studio, I have never noticed it ;)
If you want to create a custom application, you have 3 choices, all of them use Visual Studio for your coding:
use XAML/SheerUI to create your application (sheer ui reference)
use SPEAK (Speak reference) allthough Speak seems to be changing heavily in Sitecore 8.
use standard WebForms or MVC
Which one you choose, mostly depends on personal preferences and the functionality you need.
I mostly prefer using standard WebForms or MVC because of the flexibility.

Sitecore Items conversion from version 6.5 to version 6.6

I'm in the middle of developing a website using Sitecore 6.5 and when my company knew that Sitecore released version 6.6 they want to use the new version instead for the project, Is there a way to convert my Items created using sitecore 6.5(webform) to sitecore 6.6(mvc) so I wont redo my work?
General content items are not affected by switching to MVC .. it would be any presentation items that you would need to update if you did make a move to MVC. As #JayS says MVC is not mandatory and you can actually mix MVC and Webforms layouts within the solution so if you wanted to convert to MVC slowly over time it would be a possibility.
Just wanted to note that there is no such thing as 'recommended releases' any more (see: http://sdn.sitecore.net/support/versioning%20policy.aspx). Lots of customers already using 6.6 in production. The upgrade from 6.5 -> 6.6 should be straightforward (but this obviously depends on the complexity of your solution).
From my understanding, you do not need to use MVC in 6.6 if you do not want to. John West has a blog about the installer and how it enables MVC. You should be able to port your existing solution up to 6.6 relatively easily, but if you wish to take advantage of MVC you'll need to alter your solution.
Note, I believe that Sitecore has not marked 6.6 as a recommended release, so you may wish to inform your company of that.
UPDATE: Thanks to Stephen for pointing out that Sitecore has discontinued using the recommended release tagging. Some of their documentation online still needs to be updated regarding this :)

What are the changes to Drupal 7 Theming VS Drupal 6?

I've heard that Drupal 7 theming has been simplified, but couldn't find much resources on the internet about it.
I'm especially interested to learn what are the changes that boost productivity and efficiency for themers.
Since D7 is officially being launched, surely many more people will start asking this question too, so this is a good place to consolidate our knowledge of how to effectively and efficiently theme D7.
Thank you!
Some Drupal.org resources:
http://drupal.org/update/theme/6/7 changes from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7 with regards to themes
http://drupal.org/node/948216 some procedural notes on going about updating themes
The most thorough resource I've seen is PingVision's A peek at Drupal 7 theme system changes post.
You may also want to check out the Drupal 7 Theming - what's new presentation and the DrupalEasy podcast interview with John Albin Wilkins, author of the theming chapter in the Drupal 7 Module Development book.

Migrating from ColdFusion MX7 to ColdFusion 9. Any issues?

I'm planning a migration on a server from ColdFusion MX7 to ColdFusion 9. Does anyone know which steps I should take in order to achieve this without major issues? I can't find anything on the web that talks about this and I don't want to jump into this task without knowing what I'm up against.
Any suggestions, link to articles, etc. would be very much appreciated.
Thank you!
By and large, Adobe (and Macromedia before them) have gone to great lengths to ensure backward compatibility where appropriate; so the rule of thumb is that you should be fine.
First and foremost, I would make use of ColdFusion's Code Compatibility Analyzer. It is available as part of the free Developer Edition, if you want to check before upgrading.
You can find it in the ColdFusion Administrator, in the Debugging & Logging section, as "Code Analyzer".
As it says on that page:
The Code Compatibility Analyzer helps migrate your applications to ColdFusion from earlier versions of ColdFusion.
The Code Compatibility Analyzer reviews the CFML pages that you specify and informs you of any potential compatibility issues. It detects unsupported and deprecated CFML features, and outlines the required implementation changes that ensure a smooth migration.
If the Analyzer doesn't find any issues, I would then encourage you to install the developer edition and run your unit tests. (You have unit tests, right?)
If you don't have unit tests, your only other option is just to test everything manually. Good luck!
One final approach is to read the release notes for versions 8 and 9, as well as the 8.1 and 9.1 point-releases. Adobe and Macromedia were meticulous about documenting precisely what changed, which should prove helpful for you. The release notes are available as PDF for both versions 8 and 9 from Adobe.
We've just recently completed the exact same upgrade, going from CF 7 to CF 9. We didn't encounter any major issues even with old application dating back to CF 5.
As Adam pointed out the Code Compatibility Analyzer is great to find potential issues such as new signatures for existing functions or scoping problem with the new local scope.
You don't want any errors as those as sure to break with CF 9, after fixing the errors you should be left with a bunch of warnings, check them to make sure it will still do what you intended. You should not ignore them and make sure you understand the implication of ignoring one.
This page by Josh Adam's http://blog.joshuaadams.com/index.cfm/2008/9/4/Upgrading-from-ColdFusion-MX-to-ColdFusion-8 has a lot of good resource on upgrading CF in general. It's for CF 7 to CF 8 but most of it still applies to CF 9.
Before starting, the most important step of all would be to backup everything. You'll want a quick way to go back to CF 7 if you ever need to so you should have a copy of the unmodified code, configurations and CFusionMX/jRun directory. I just ended up ghosting the machine in case.