What we learned on our first D8 launch (in 7 weeks)

ICF Olson recently (Feb 2016) launched its first Drupal 8 site (icfolson.com).  Our initial goal was to provide a responsive Drupal 8 site for the new ICFOlson brand.

The task was not with without challenges. We knew the Drupal 8 contrib space was still catching up, we were on a short time-frame, and we were developing our new brand at the same time.  Drupal 8 is still new and the development team was playing catch-up to learn the new tricks of the trade.

Some of the contrib modules that we would typically use like the Panels suite were not production ready so we focused on efforts on using as much of core functionality as possible with the idea that we would eventually expand into using Panels.  Core offers a lot more flexibility with the expansion of blocks as entities, more focus on display and form modes, and the inclusion of Views. 

There's definitely more to figure out with Drupal 8 as best practices have not been established yet.  From build processes and hosting to component based design / style guides, and the use of configuration management and features.

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