Drupal 8 and Symfony? Here at Eton Digital we eagerly welcomed the announcement that the 8th version of Drupal would incorporate various major components.
As the release date for that Drupal release (#8) was approaching, there was a steadily increasing buzz building on various development blogs about the implications for how we will design and build websites after the release – what these sites will be able to do – and how well they will be able to perform.
#Drupal 8 offered developers the best of both worlds – CMS and frameworks
As a PHP framework, one of Symfony’s biggest strengths is that it is built around independent modules which can be activated separately, without needing to interact with each other – meaning that it is a superb tool if you prize good performance from websites.
#Integration
For Drupal 8, the Symfony modules which were being integrated at far from minor. According to the Symfony blog, Drupal 8 incorporated HttpFoundation, HttpKernel, Routing, EventDispatcher, DependencyInjection and ClassLoader.
It was also much easier to include custom Symfony applications into Drupal – and vice versa.
All in all, the development was excellent news for those who regularly employed both Drupal and Symfony.
#More insights
For a more detailed insight into the motivations behind the integration, check out this great video recording from SymfonyLive Paris 2012 when the changes were discussed with Larry Garfield, lead on Web Services and Context Core Initiative for Drupal 8.
For some detailed coverage from DrupalCon Denver regarding the Symfony updates, see the videos and slides posted over at the Symfony blog.
Finally, there’s also a superb in-depth blog post from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert covering some of the more general changes in the forthcoming Drupal release – mainly how they planned to deal with the problem of ever – increasing complexity as the CMS matures and expands and how to maintain a reasonable level of accessibility for users.
Those were very exciting times are for Drupal and Symfony developers!
