Drupal 8 changed the way our teams work

Amazee Labs started working on Drupal 8 websites more than 3 years ago. Since the beginning of 2016, we do not offer new implementation in Drupal 7 anymore. In the last year, the collaboration between our frontend developers, sitebuilding & backend developers has undergone a shift in processes to adapt to the new possibilities and limits of working with Drupal 8.

We will talk about three different topics.

• Dev Stack: With our new server stack, we started working with docker and a completely new auto deploy system that compiles our frontend build using npm/Gulp.

• Site Building: When on Drupal 7 most sitebuilding was done through the interface, on Drupal 8 we had to learn to step debug our preprocess functions. The CMI was adopted with a lot of enthusiasm but brought with it a set of completely new problems when clients started editing configuration on our staging and production server.

• Front-end workflow: Our frontend team refactored our build system and created a new starter theme "Beaker" for all Amazee Labs offices. The new base theme allows us to have a clean starting point without heavy dependencies like the Omega theme. It also provides useful mixins and front-end tools. By using twig to control the markup, sitebuilder had to rethink how our Drupal sites are built.

Overall, the roles and responsibilities of our developers got redefined in the process. Previously the site builder was in control of all the markup via Panelizer and with the use of Twig we are putting more powers into the hands of our front-end developers.