Drupal 7 or Drupal 8?

zig

Hi,

I've several years PHP experience and a pretty big job has landed on me with fairly tight deadline. Well moreso important than big I think.

It has to be done in Drupal. I had never used Drupal so I started digging in a few days ago. While I found it fairly ok I fear given the deadline that I could struggle with certain things.

I started by setting up an installation of Drupal 8 but realised after how new that was, so most support questions online are in relation to Drupal 7.

I was also considering using a theme as a base start to the project to make it easier to learn (even though the designs will be provided to me). But even some themes i want don't seem to built for Drupal 8 because "its not stable yet".

Should I just go with Drupal 7 given Im only learning it and need to rely on many of the questions being asked before online? Im finding it to difficult to learn something when the main online community is only learning to transfer over to that too if you follow.

Also, would anyone be interested in helping me by answering questions or even looking at code or pointing me in the right direction if Im stuck/struggling with anything.

You'd be paid of course!

frost

Hey Zig,
I've been using Drupal for about 9 years, starting with version 4.something. For a new Drupaler right now, I would recommend going with Drupal 7. I suppose a case could be made for you to go with 8 if you are building what amounts to a brochure site. That is, if the core functionality on its own is enough for what you want, then you wont have to worry about contrib modules that arent ready for 8 yet, and your only worry will be to find a stable enough theme to use. But even so, as a new person to Drupal, you have already discovered the real reason for sticking with 7 -- there are a lot of resources and people in the community for D7 but not nearly as much for 8.

The drawback to 7 is of course that not everything you learn in 7 will be transferable to D8. In particular the theming layer is much different in 8. But even so, you will still be better off, in my opinion, going with 7, because the most important part of using Drupal is the community. They are great - both here in Ireland and internationally - and I would say necessary to really get the most out of the system.

To answer your specific question about themes, I suppose there are broadly 3 routes you can take. First, you can use an existing fully fledged theme, ie one that already looks like a finished design, then just subtheme it and tweak the subtheme. That's the fastest and easiest route, and you will learn some things about themes. This is often enough, though it's the least flexible and you will learn the least.

The second route is to use a "base" theme, that is, a theme that is designed to just be a starting theme, and build up from that (e.g. Zen, Omega, Adaptive). The advantage here is that it gives you more control and you learn more, although much of what you learn will be specific to that base theme. There are a few good base themes out there. I've used Omega but not many of the others, so I can't really give a fair opinion, but they all have their own features, drawbacks, toolkits & support community. Searching for themes by "most downloaded" will give you an idea of what people are using.

The last choice is go with building a theme from scratch. Most control, most learning, possibly steepest learning curve, but it does allow you to start from the "bare metal" and only add what you want, which many people prefer.

Of course what route you choose also is related to the complexity of the design you are handed. Some designs are really easy to translate to a theme, and others can be more challenging.

Hope this gets you started, but if you want to follow up with more specific questions please feel free to contact me.
Mike