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Well the time has come for me to trial Drupal 8. I’m wanting to upgrade “early” as due to work pressures I probably won’t have massive amoutns of time to do so in the near future otherwise. My initial aim is to do a direct upgrade from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 “As is” (Including sticking with Bartik as my default theme). Then once stable I will look to build my theme out. I have yet decided if I am going to build a “from scratch” Drupal 8 twig theme, or whether I will be using a base theme. As a developer by heart, I will be concentrating on development based themes where everything is done through code instead of fancy wysiwyg (What You See Is What You Get) themes. This means I am leaving behind the Omega theme [drupal.org] which version 4 I loved so much. Version 5 has taken Omega back to its roots of a front end and site builder theme. Whilst I really applaud this (It’s a niche Drupal needs to fill), it isn’t for me. At present Fubhy (One of the 2 main developers behind Omega 4) looks to be developing some boilerplate theme’s for Drupal 8 under the name Khan (As in the Original Star Trek TV Series/Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan/Star Trek: Into Darkness character). If he continues with these I may well use those. However, despite my loathing of it for D7 themes, I am also tempted to try out Bootstrap [getbootstrap.com]with D8 (My Appologies to Fubhy and any other front end people who read this). I am tempted to also try out Zen [drupal.org] at some point once it has a stable 8.x-7.x release.
So as you can see I have a lot to do. Screenshots of everything I manage to screenshot will be provided in this blog or via the web in some way. I am also tempted to make my davidthorne.net [davidthorne.net] site build public on my github account (Although I will fork the Drupal 8 developement away from the original private repository due to the almost obligatory accidental commits containing settings.php files or similar) coupled with my Vagrantfile and provisioning environment which I intend to publish on Ansible Galaxy [galaxy.ansible.com] anyway.
Thoughts as always welcome.