Luckily in our case, we only have one form and it was easy enough to form_alter to get the structure needed. In the past, the area where we really needed the bootstrap theme's magic was for theming form elements since bootstrap has a particular group of form classes and structure that takes some finagling to get drupal to output. In Drupal 8, the bootstrap base theme wasn't really necessary for our site as we could just simply add in the bootstrap coding through our theme files.
This allowed us to rapidly build bootstrap sites extremely easily. We're huge fans of the bootstrap framework and in D7 we had the best setup – bootstrap base theme with the panels bootstrap layout builder. The cleanliness of Drupal's output in D8 is wonderful and very easy to work with. So our approach with Twig was the same, no sub-theme. Some people may not care about this, but you will care when you have to debug something and you don't know where to look first – was it drupal, the sub-theme, or a module? I think it's best to start out this way because then you get a feel for what drupal outputs naturally, whereas if you always used a base-theme, you don't know if the output you're looking at was a product of native drupal or some magic of the sub-theme. If you're starting with pre-built html and css mockups, then just inserting Drupal's theme variables is quite easy. When we first started building Drupal sites back in 2008, we always built our own themes. This wasn't something we could find in the array dumps. The hardest part about working with Twig is getting the variables you want. This made it really stupid-easy to find out what theme files we needed to edit.
Drupal 8 bootstrap code#
The coolest part about Twig is enabling the Twig debugging, which shows you in the code where theme file suggestions begin and end. Just edit your template files and add the twig variables. Once you get past those nuances, the actual theming process is very similar to D7. There are a ton of great tutorials out there to get you started with building a new twig theme, so I won't go there.
So this forced us to rethink and get back to the basics of building a Drupal site. I feel like we were a bit spoiled in D7 because we leveraged contrib modules so much that going back to template files felt a bit foreign. We started in the D8 Beta stage with a fresh install, then scratched our heads because our usual building block D7 modules weren't ready yet, like page manager, panels, panelizer, webform, to name a few. Regardless, we got it up and here are the highlights of our experience and also a few mini tutorials. I'm happy to say that we relaunched our parent agency's site on Drupal 8 within one day of Drupal 8's release, however it would have been the same day if we didn't encounter some last minute "drush up" fails causing us to rebuild some parts of the site (all the the page manager variants that magically disappeared in the updates).
0 kommentar(er)
