We have exciting news to report from Portland: Drupal 8 looks very interesting. Many of the features of the new version have been agreed on at this point and they are expected to freeze the code in July, spending the rest of the year fixing bugs and polishing it so that a stable version of the application can be released in 2014. This is discussed in the Keynote from Dries, the creator of Drupal.

What does this mean for the content management system, for Drupal? Well, fortunately for Drupal is is quite good at content with a lot of discrete fields. There is an argument that the core development for the platform should focus on improving that strength so that Drupal can expand to be a great content management system that meets a wide variety of needs. If a web presentation layer is built on top of that, like we and Amherst have done with Monster Menus, that’s great if it meets our needs, but it may not make sense to have that as a priority for the underlying application.

Videos for all of the sessions are available on the conference website. We’ll be happy to (try to) answer any questions you might have about Drupal in the comments.

Drupal 7 Upgrade Update

We have completed the migration of most of the custom modules that make Middlebury’s sites work. Just before leaving for this conference, we were able to get the Middlebury website’s database migrated to Drupal 7 in development and the homepage working with real content from the database. The majority of the remaining work on the project is to move over the theme files one-by-one and test that the output is still working correctly, followed by the migration of a few modules, like the ones that support the campus map, that are presentation-intensive and couldn’t be tested without the theme layers finished.

Progress on the project can be seen in our code repository.