Blogrimage 2013 Day 5: Calling a Mulligan

I'm calling a mulligan and restarting with a new challenge: I'm going to spend the rest of the 30 days rebuilding thegreenbag.com as a Drupal 8 site.

I hate to do this, because I was really hoping to make more of a contribution back to the Drupal community by participating in the #1day1patch campaign, but I'm just spending too much time finding issues I can work on, and don't have enough time left over to actually work on anything. So instead, I'm going to work on getting a production site up and running on Drupal 8.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, Drupal 8 is still in early stages of development. Development recently passed the "feature freeze" and "feature complete" and now developers are working toward a "code freeze" in July 2013. At this point, there isn't even an alpha release, and the code can change dramatically on a daily basis.

I would not try to build a complex site at this point, but thegreenbag.com is relatively simple at this point. Started as a family joke in the summer of 1999, the site has gone through a number of revisions and transformations. I deleted most of the content last year, and it's really just a two-page site now. My plan for the blogrimage is to get those two pages back in order (with their attached photos), create a photo gallery, and get the site styled appropriately. Thanks to all of the new features in Drupal 8, I should be able to do this almost entirely with core and not need many -- if any -- contributed modules.

Today's tasks

Today's tasks included upgrading PHP. I'm running CentOS 6 on that server, which currently provides PHP 5.3.3. However, the minimum requirement for Drupal 8 is PHP 5.3.5. I've used the Atomic RPM channels from Atomicorp with older Linux distributions, and went back to them again today to get PHP 5.3.22 installed on my server today. Adding this repository also upgraded my MySQL and memcache installations, so after checking to make sure all of my other sites were not broken, I was ready to install Drupal 8.

I backed up the existing site and dropped all of its database tables so I could start fresh. I downloaded Drupal 8 by cloning the git repository and ran the installer, then created two page nodes to replace the existing pages. The photos are still broken, but the site is up and running, and I've got a starting point. Getting a chance to work on this site a little bit every day should be a lot easier than the struggles I had trying to find patches to work on.