After building one of the first enterprise Drupal 8 platforms, we speak from experience when we say: if you are an enterprise organization, you should be seriously considering the move to Drupal 8. For many in the Drupal world, Drupal 8 is still viewed with apprehension. With this panel, we’re here to unveil the D8 mystery. In the changing CMS landscape, enterprises have a lot to gain from the more decoupled, API-focused content repository that Drupal 8 is evolving toward. Drupal’s paradigm shift will vastly improve the way organizations ingest, store, publish, and distribute content through multiple channels. But is the investment worth it? For the enterprise, our answer is an enthusiastic yes. In this session, discover: How Drupal 8’s structure fundamentally changes the way organizations approach platform building The impact of Drupal 8’s configuration management improvements The benefits of integrated front-end tools and external libraries The challenges enterprise organizations will face adopting Drupal 8 (and how to overcome them) How other enterprise organizations are already harnessing the power of Drupal 8 How to get started!

1. © 2015 Phase2
Drupal 8, Don’t Be Late

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About us
Evan Liebman - Director of MSK Digital
Frank Febbraro - CTO, Phase2
Michael Le Du - Head of Strategic Accounts, Phase2

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The time has come
to consider Drupal 8

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Content as we know it, is changing
● Text and images (most websites)
● Multimedia (YouTube, Netflix, Spotify)
● Web Applications (Trello, Basecamp, Salesforce)
● Social Media Streams (Facebook, Twitter, etc)
● IoT (FitBit, Automatic for autos, Echobee)

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Content consumption has changed
● PCs consuming web pages
● Mobile (iPhone, iPad, Android)
● “Over the top” (AppleTV, Xbox/PS, Smart-TV)
● Wearables (Apple Watch, Google Glass)
● IoT (Amazon Echo, Smart appliances, Automotive)

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Dries addressed this in his keynote
● getNextBestExperience()
● Integrating with 3rd party services
● Pushing contextual content to different endpoints
● Personalized content experiences
○ No two experiences are the same
○ 100% dynamic

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Could you be disrupted?
● Does your current CMS allow you to easily distribute
content in these channels?
● In a maintainable and extensible way?
● If you don’t make your content readily accessible
where people consume it, and relevant to their
context, someone else will (or already has).

8. © 2015 Phase2 Don’t be “LEFT BEHIND”

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Drupal 8
Now?

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Spoiler Alert!!
Drupal 8 is already being used in
production

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Why now is the time to consider Drupal 8
● It’s being used in production
● Has stack support for all required components
● Less dependence on contrib
● Fully reap the benefits of the platform lifecycle
● Use a tool built for today and the future
● Become part of the solution
● A chance to attract the best talent

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Memorial Sloan Kettering
Drupal 8 Case Study

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-Jacob Rockowitz
“Drupal 8, Don’t Be Late”

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How the MSK Culture Inspired Us to
Become an Early Adopter of Drupal 8
● A culture of innovation
● Relentless pursuit, and unmatched expertise that
results in breakthrough advances

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Collaborative Focus at MSK
● Multi-center studies driving the generation of new
knowledge
● Cross service collaboration to aid the diagnosis and
treatment, and research

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Why is Community important?
● We are all trying to solve similar problems
● People can leverage our work
● Can leverage other people’s work
● Allows bigger problems to be solved
● The community helps drives Innovation

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MSK’s Strategic Priorities
● Patient Experience
● Patient Access
● Innovation and Generation of New Knowledge
● Talent Recruitment
● Financial Sustainability

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Patient Experience and Access
● Easy access to the information the user needs

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Innovation and Generation of New
Knowledge
● D8 cutting edge technology

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Talent Recruitment
● Broader the talent pool

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Financial Sustainability
● Gain the long term ROI from the investment, no need
to re-platform in a few years

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So the Adventure Begins...and
Successfully Launches
● MSKCC.org
● SloanKettering.edu

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This is more than a brochure site
● D6 site with 114 contrib
● D8 with 9 modules
● Serves 7 personas
● Related content
● Faceted search
● Webforms
● Online payment
● MailChimp Integration
● Prediction tools
● Multiple sites
● Multiple layouts
● PDF generation
● Multi server cluster
● LDAP authentication
● Data aggregation
● Data synchronization to
apps

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Drupal 8’s Flexibility Simplified Problems
● Can centralize logic into services (layout logic, override
controllers without hacking core)
● We created YAML Forms because there was no Web forms
● No Panels, we used HTML template expansion
● Many D8 module upgrades were only a few days of work
○ Redis, Memcache, Redirect, Node Order

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What else did we gain from Drupal 8?
● Developer velocity (once past the learning curve)
● MSK was able to participate in making Drupal 8
better

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Were there any surprises?
● Core features weren’t as “done” as most people believe
them to be
● How easy it is to do powerful things with minimal code
● Lack of robust documentation
● The power of using YAML and how clean and readable it is
○ Non-programmers can create YAML docs

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What did we trade off with Drupal 8?
● There weren’t many contrib modules
● Lack of best practices and practical knowledge
● Core wasn’t even feature complete when it started
○ Migration, Views, CMI, APIs
● Core changed very fast, took work to keep up with
breaking changes
● The project went live before a guaranteed upgrade path

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Drupal 8 Lessons Learned

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Managing Core & Contrib

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Dedicate a person to core
● Have one person focused primarily on “Core” issues
● The ground needs to be cleared for the team
● Shepherd patches into core
● Re-roll/revive stalled community efforts
● Sometimes you have to code around bugs in core

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Schedule for regular upgrades to core
● Either a known working HEAD or release
● Plan to pin/freeze within sight of launch
● Don’t let it go too long as debt accumulates
● Track the core changelog to understand what could
affect you

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Don’t wait on contrib
● They might not catch up
○ Migration
○ Layout
○ Forms
○ Stack Components (memcache/redis)
○ LDAP

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Addressing Risk

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Prototype to mitigate risk
● Get a site up and prototype key features and functionality
● Get your content to migrate and render
● Don’t worry about theming in the beginning (Bartik is
fine)
● You can import using bulk insert

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Account for the learning curve
● Give the team time to navigate the learning curve
○ You’ll make it up later
○ Modern PHP / Services / Symfony / CMI enable more
productivity
○ Teams need to learn new way
■ Learn to do things the right way via Services, etc.
■ They also need to unlearn old Drupal ways

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Don't assume you know what would go well
● Be ready to have a plan B & C (you’ll probably need it)
● Core features may not be as “done” as you think
● Plan for potential stack issues (PHP, Memcache, etc.)
● Be ready to make stack changes if needed
○ Memcache + PHP5.4 => Memcache + PHP 5.5

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Pulling It All Together

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Take advantage of the front end separation
● TWIG let’s the front end ramp up quickly
● Leverage grunt, bower, sass and other js tools
● Services and filters make it easier to
“componentize” the frontend

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Front end component example

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Have tight collaboration between teams
● The frontend was built as a standalone prototype
● Once design was approved it was moved into Drupal
● Be flexible both ways
○ sometimes it’s easier to start with Drupal’s
markup
○ Sometimes it better to modify TWIG templates

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Use testing to catch regressions
● Use PHPUnit and Behat to catch regressions
○ Custom code will break during upgrades (API
changes)
○ Make identifying regressions easy and automated
○ Especially before a beta to beta migration path exists
○ Tests are easier to build when you are extending
objects with existing test coverage

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Use build tools
● Automate, automate, automate
● Seriously, don’t wait to do this.
● We used a combination of Drush and Grunt
● Facilitate integration of multiple repos
● Code quality, testing, deployment, migration.

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Manage your dependencies
● Drush Make (now with YAML make file support)
● NPM for JS build dependencies
● Bower for the front end JS
● Grunt was used to materialize the site and build
the frontend

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Make use of YAML where possible
● YAML Forms (webforms configured via YAML)
● Your users can write in YAML, seriously, ours do.
● YAML is a great format for serialization of data
● Install Symfony components to output YAML in D6/7

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Migration shouldn’t be a 2nd class citizen
● You may not use it after launch, but it is certainly not
a throw away
● Constant migration is powerful but tricky
● Expect the migration to break across environments
○ And across core versions

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Managing Environments

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Make is easy to get developers setup
● Complex setups can be brittle across developers
● Our dev's needed VPN access, which was brittle
● Dev’s needed to run a long D6 to D8 migration

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Don't neglect your server environments
● Focus on the platform delayed getting our
environments provisioned
● Get your servers up early
● Try to limit additional risk in the stack
● Hard to troubleshoot bugs can creep up here

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Small environmental differences can cause issues
● “Close enough” doesn’t always work to mimic prod
● Use all layers of the stack
○ As soon as you have something testable (or before)
● Even on the same servers, the hostname can change
behavior
● HTTP vs HTTPS can cause differences

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Load testing !== production traffic
● Load tests are great indicators potential problems
● They don't actually guarantee anything
● Production traffic will always be different
○ Even when replaying production traffic logs
● Even “low traffic” times may surprise you
○ A spider started aggressively crawling at 5AM

51. CONTENT. COLLABORATION. EXPERIENCE.
How can you get started?

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Drupal 8 Considerations
● Pick D8 candidates carefully
● No short timelines
● Have the right team
○ Drupal exp, quick learners, problem solvers, profilers
● Get involved with the community
○ You'll need their help

53. © 2015 Phase2
Key Resources
● www.mskcc.org
● www.sloankettering.edu
● Adventures in Drupal 8: http://phase.to/1K8rKuX
● Driving Drupal 8 Adoption: http://phase.to/1cxvsQD
● Interview with Evan: http://phase.to/1K8qS9A
● Transforming Enterprises w/ Drupal 8 : http://phase.to/1K8r8Fx
● Phase2 & MSK: http://phase.to/1K8rsUI

54. CONTENT. COLLABORATION. EXPERIENCE.
Q&A

55. PHASE2TECHNOLOGY.COM