5 useful documentation resources before starting your first Drupal 8 project

Are you thinking about developing with Drupal 8?

This blog post is the second one in a series of three in which we are trying to share our Drupal 8 experiences with you. In our previous blog post we talked about some thoughts and recommendations that will help you climb the Drupal 8 learning curve. In this one we will discuss some learning resources and points where you will find very good talks, examples or documentation that will make your life easier. Let’s start!

Change records for Drupal core

One of the most useful documentation points that helped me a lot was the change records for Drupal Core. If you have some experience with Drupal 7(or not) you will find all the API changes made in Drupal here. You can search by keywords and filter by several parameters. Each change record is well documented with examples and is linked with the issues that introduced the change, so you will be able to inspect the whole patch and the discussion around the issue.

Drupal 8 Contrib porting tracker

Before the drupal 8 contrib porting tracker project the information about the status of the different contrib modules wasn’t centralized in the same place. Some of them started working in Github to make the development and the review process easier. Because of that, if you wanted to know the status of a concrete project, you had to find out where the main repository was located or look for an issue titled “Drupal 8” or “Drupal 8 port”, etc. Aside from that, each company or person had to build their own spreadsheets about the status of the different contrib modules, duplicating efforts.

In the attempt to solve this, the contrib porting tracker was announced a few months ago, which is a meta project that holds issues that represent the porting status of various projects. Now the information is centralized in the same place. You can also find the information as a kanban board for better visualization.

Drupal API documentation

Documentation of Drupal’s API is one of the strongest features of Drupal, thanks to hundreds of contributors that work hard to keep it in a good state. It’s very well documented and structured. You can find the version for Drupal 8 at: https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/8

Youtube channel of the Drupal Association

The Drupal Association has a youtube channel where you can find most sessions of the different DrupalCons and other important events recorded. All sessions are quite interesting and cover different topics like Dev Ops, Theming, Business & Strategy.

If you missed any of these talks you will have the opportunity to watch them here and learn from the best!

The examples module

The examples module is essential if you are looking for examples in your daily work. As you can read on the main project page

“The Examples for Developers project aims to provide high-quality, well-documented API examples for a broad range of Drupal core functionality.”

For the Drupal 8 version some examples have been added, such as:

• D8 plugin example.
• Config Entity example.

• Tour example.

Other examples that were available in prior versions have been ported to D8, like:

• Block example
• Cache example

• Field example

More examples are still not ported, so your help is needed! When contributing with some examples you’ll learn a topic in detail and at the same time you will be helping others with it.

You can find the complete list with the status of each example at [meta] Port examples to D8.

Keep reading

Like we said in the beginning, this blog post is one in the series that we write about recommendations and thoughts that will be helpful if you are thinking about starting your first Drupal 8 project. 

We hope that this will make the learning curve easier for you!