Help get CiviCRM firing with Drupal 8 beta

Published
2015-02-24 21:35
Written by
petednz - member of the CiviCRM community - view blog guidelines

Can you help Fuzion take the Drupal 8 integration module that was developed as part of 2014 Google Summer of Code and get it working with the most recent version of Drupal 8 and publicly available for testing?

Getting CiviCRM ready for Drupal 8 was always going to be a task with many stages. Thanks to the funding from the Google Summer of Code 2014 in August last year Torrance, was able to get CiviCRM functioning well on what was then the latest alpha of Drupal 8. Highlights of this work included a native, Drupal-side installer for CiviCRM, Views integration using CiviCRM to discover the database schema (cutting the Views module from 15,000 lines to code to under 2,000), and a set of integration tests for both CiviCRM and Views.

But as Drupal 8 has continued active development, many core APIs have changed and ….. the integration has regressed.

Lots of these changes are relatively minor: during alpha there were still plenty of structured arrays hanging around which have now mostly been moved into well defined interfaces; or similarly plenty of hard dependencies on object classes have been abstracted into interfaces. There’s also been a few slightly more significant code changes, with several hooks that were still hanging around having been pulled into the new plugin system for example.

Drupal 8 is now at beta 6 and is becoming much more stable; APIs have settled down and the code churn is much reduced. Now is a good time to work through the existing Drupal 8 integration code, update function signatures to match the new interfaces, and get CiviCRM working correctly on Drupal 8.

By getting through this next tranche of work we can set the ground for thorough testing of the module in the lead up for Drupal 8.0 final.

Fuzion is proposing to fund 1 hour for every 4 hours funded for the next tranche of 50 hours of work (our estimate for getting Drupal and CiviCRM playing nicely enough that we can get this pushed out). So yes we are looking for others in the CiviCRM community to chip in and help fund this important work to make sure CiviCRM is set for Drupal 8.

Can you help us push on with this next stage so we can get the integration available for public testing? If so please drop by this page and chip in.

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Comments

Anonymous (not verified)
2015-03-30 - 05:45

Hi Pete

Can you please give a quick status update on this? How much is already completed? How much funding would still be needed to complete it?

Thanks, Beat

Hi Beat - either this hasn't caught enough eyeballs, or my 'ask' was poorly explained, or perhaps everyone is just playing a 'waiting game' on this.

We have a window during the Easter break to put in some more of Torrance's time on this but as yet no-one has chipped in.

Maybe it hasn't caught enough eyeballs but it could also use some specifics of how the community can help. Is this primarily to get funding fro Torrance to continue his work on refining CiviCRM for D8 or are you looking to put together a team for sprints, etc... 

I've been trying to keep Torrance's progress on my radar since last year, when I first saw what he was up to, so I'm keen to help if I can.

Andrew

I think the community involvement comes once we can get a releasable version out which is the focus of this next effort. But I will get Torrance to comment in the next few days.

Anonymous (not verified)
2015-05-22 - 02:17

Is there any progress on the D8 integration? Would there still more funds needed to complete this?

Thanks, Beat

Hi Beat,

I put in a couple of days work about a month ago now and got the module working against the latest Drupal 8 beta (at the time, beta-9) and Civicrm 4.6.3 in time for the Denver CiviCon sprint. I also managed to get the installer working again.

You can check out the current state of things (along with all the bugs and so on) here: https://drupal8.fudev.co.nz/ (login: demo password: demo). You'll note I've created a demo views page as well listing civicrm contacts. Any bugs you come across, please feel welcome to open an issue on Jira and assign to me.

I've documented the installation procedure if you'd like to have a go at installing a local copy to play with: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-drupal/tree/8.x-master (and I will update this if it's not clear enough or there are issues in the process).

Hi Beat - a bunch of progress was made by us just prior to the sprint - largely thanks to your funding. I will get one of the team to provide an update here since I wasn't at the sprint to catch up on what happened there. Again many thanks for the funding you already contributed to help this move along.