Lessons Learned from Upgrading the Node Hierarchy Module

This session is mostly for people that have written module code in Drupal 7, and wish to get up-and-running quickly with Drupal 8.

If you've used the Drupal API to whip up a module before, get ready for a huge shock because almost nothing is the same in Drupal 8. Much of the contributed module code prior to Drupal 8 was written in procedural PHP, while Drupal 8 encourages an OOP-based approach. Gone are the days of whipping up Drupal code in Notepad++ or some basic text editor, and say hello to IDEs like PHPstorm.

The Node Hierarchy module has been around since Drupal 5, and it  allows a parent-child relationship to exist between entities so that children may inherit properties of the parents, grandparents, and so on. This may be desirable with breadcrumbs, menu links, paths, blocks, taxonomy, and so on, although the module doesn't support inheritance for all of those things just yet. 

In this session, we'll cover are some very good tips and tricks to get you up and running quickly with Drupal. For example, you'll learn how to create a Drupal module with plenty of scaffolding in minutes with a command line tool. We'll also cover lessons learned while upgrading the module from Drupal 7. Lastly, we'll take a brief tour of the Node Hierarchy module as it exists today.