24 Jun 2020

Upgrading to Drupal 9 update

Now is the best time to start preparing for Drupal 9 whether you are on Drupal 7 or 8 - or even on another platform entirely.

Are you thinking TLDR? OK, the summary is;

Drupal 7 end-of-life on Nov 28, 2022

As this article explains: Previously, Drupal 7's end-of-life was scheduled for November 2021. Given the impact of COVID-19 on budgets and businesses, the Drupal community are extending the end of life until November 28, 2022. The Drupal Security Team will continue to follow the Security Team processes for Drupal 7 core and contributed projects.

Drupal 8 end-of-life on Nov 2, 2021

Drupal 8 will still be end-of-life on November 2, 2021, due to Symfony 3's end of life. However, since the upgrade path from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 is much easier, the Drupal community doesn't anticipate the same impact on end-users.

Drupal 9 was officially released Jun 3, 2020

Drupal 9 was officially be released on the 3rd of June 2020, giving Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 users little over two years to upgrade to Drupal 9 when they reach end-of-life in November 2022.

What is Drupal 9?

As you can imagine, we’re really excited about Drupal 9 here at Catch, so we’ve had a think and put together our recommendations on what you should be thinking about how to prepare your websites for Drupal 9, (and, spoiler alert, why you should make the move to Drupal 8 now).

Essentially it’s intended to be the same as Drupal 8.9, but with deprecated code removed, so if your website has been maintained correctly upgrading will be super straightforward. 

This means that Drupal 9 ships with all of the awesome new functionality that was added in Drupal 8, such as Media, Configuration Management, Migration, Multilingual, Workflows and an API-first architecture.

It also means that, unlike previous upgrades, you won’t have to wait long for the community modules to be updated - early adoption won’t be punished. As far back as April 2019, 44% of the 7,000 modules available for Drupal 8 have been confirmed as ready for Drupal 9.

But what does all this mean? 

First and foremost, it means the community are ready and raring to go and your upgrade from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9 will be a breeze compared to any previous platform upgrades you may have undergone  Secondarily, with this new, clearer upgrade pathway established, when Drupal 10 comes out, the upgrade from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10 will be just as simple.

“Great, but I’m still on Drupal 7”

You may have kept Drupal 7 as your trusted CMS for many years - possibly even since it was initially released back in 2011. Migrating websites is a large task so we totally understand why you have held onto it for so long.

With Drupal 7 reaching end-of-life November 2022 (and yes, two years counts as soon!) now is the best time to migrate to a new version of Drupal. You’ll have lots of things to consider, one of the biggest being should you move to Drupal 8 now, or wait until Drupal 9 is released?

We strongly recommend starting the migration process sooner rather than later with a move to Drupal 8, the main reason being that migrating to a new platform takes a lot of planning, and if you’re also looking for a new digital partner the procurement process can be a long and gruelling one.

Our Immersion process is designed to help you discover just what it is you - and more importantly, your users - need from your digital platform. We work collaboratively with you to establish both business and user goals, requirements and content needs, creating prototypes to help solve tricky user experience conundrums and build-out and complex technical integrations you may need. With the hard work out of the way, migrating to Drupal 9 will be a breeze!

Get in touch to chat to us about migrating to Drupal 8 - we’d love to be a part of your journey.

“I’ve already made the jump to Drupal 8, what do I do now?”

We’ve been using Drupal 8 at Catch since before its full release in December 2015 so our clients have been feeling the benefits of Drupal 8 for almost five years already.

As well as some amazing performance improvements to serve your website to your users quicker, new functionality was added to Drupal 8 which you and your users have been getting the most of, we’ve put together some of our favourites.

  • Multilingual out of the box - previously you needed to use many modules to reliably be able to translate your website, with Drupal 8 it’s available out of the box
  • Configuration Management - This has been added to Drupal to make keeping environments in sync much easier. Gone are the days of ‘but it worked on this environment’, only to find out someone had missed a step
  • Migration - good news if you’re looking to migrate to Drupal 8 before upgrading to Drupal 9. Migration is available out of the box and is simpler to configure and ever before
  • Workflows - can be customised to manage your content authoring process, or even for the flow that a product has to go through from purchase to shipping
  • API-first architecture - Create your content once and use it across your website and apps
  • Media - fed up with uploading the same image twice? Drupal 8 comes with Media library for you to re-use your images and other media across your website

As Drupal 8 will also become end-of-life in November 2021, there is over a year to get ready but we are starting the process of making sure our clients websites will be ready for Drupal 9 now by auditing the code to make sure the code we have used hasn’t been deprecated since we implemented it. We recommend you do the same.

Already on Drupal 8 but not sure if you’re ready for Drupal 9? We can help! Get in touch to talk to us about auditing your current site to make sure you’re Drupal 9 ready!

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25 Oct 2019

Goodbye Sketch...

Hi, I'm Sam Hainsworth, Design Lead at Catch, and I want to tell you about our Creative Team's recent move from Sketch to Figma and the benefits it has brought us in creating a more collaborative and efficient work process.

It wasn’t so long since that if you asked a designer what software they used to create just about anything, the answer would more likely have included the word ‘Adobe’.

Today, there are so many options to bring creativity to life, that a big question more often than not is: what’s the best design software out there right now? And the answer for a while was Sketch, but not anymore. 

Our hearts have been stolen by Figma.

What’s Figma you ask? In many ways, it’s exactly like Sketch…Invision, Principle, Craft, Google Drive, and Dropbox. It may sound like a Frankenstein's mess of a platform, but it’s possibly the greatest design eco-system ever built to date (my own views here...!)

Figma at heart is a web app - yes, no software needed other than a web browser - that allows Designers, Developers, and Clients to collaborate together to make beautiful creations of any kind. It's the first piece of software that has managed to combine a design tool, prototyping, and animation that allows teams to be able to work together with ease.

For the sake of this article, I’ve split it into 2 key areas (designing and prototyping ) on why we think Figma is the king.


Designing with Figma

As a design tool, Figma is A LOT like Sketch. They’ve certainly done a great job at making the transition from Sketch to Figma easy for us: the interface feels the same, we still have symbols, artboards, etc. But there are some pretty important differences.

Real-time collaboration 

Remember the first time you opened Google Docs and saw someone else typing in real-time, deep down thinking “wow, we really are in the future”, well Figma has taken the idea of real-time collaboration and applied it within their software, allowing multiple people to work on one project at once.

It might sound like you could have the classic hovering Creative Director watching your every movement from the comfort of their own seat, but it becomes such a useful tool. No more do you have 2 Designers working on multiple files and then merging their creative 2 hours later to find they’ve used different fonts weights or having to export assets for each other. This real-time collaboration lets designers have a single source of truth for each project and collaborate in tandem, rather than in silos.

Connected design systems

With many concurrent projects in an agency, one thing that can be a real struggle to keep is consistency. Over the years, projects grow and with that so do the components and styles that build these websites, apps, platforms, etc. Design systems within Sketch (or any other design tool for that matter) are static files that can often get forgotten about or duplicated along the way, creating chaos.

These systems, within Figma, act as your hymn sheet for each client; letting you store reusable assets that can be shared across the design team and projects. Figma transforms these static design systems into live breathing sources of truth (sounds a big deal, well it really is!) that can be worked on together and pulled across many different projects.

 

File management 

Now, this may sound boring, but this truly is such a game-changer: How many times have you been looking for the final creative you worked on 3 months ago, only to find 4 files all with the word ‘FINAL’ at the end of it. Or to not even be able to find where it was saved in the first place?

With Figma, all files are saved within their own cloud eco-system; allowing you to access all your files anywhere, at any time; and with their neat interface, ways of organising and sorting, it's so much easier to access the whole teams’ files.

 

Version history

Last, but by no means least, we have version history: which is again a real lifesaver and means you don’t need to create hundreds of duplicate files anymore. Figma allows you to go back in time and see how your designs have progressed, giving you the option to create key milestones in the project. 

 

Prototyping with Figma

This is where Figma gets really interesting. In the past, prototyping meant uploading your designs to Invision, Marvel, etc. and then adding interactions and repeating every time you got feedback. Figma takes that pain away and lets you prototype and present directly. Essentially, letting you create a clickable prototype and show off fully animated interactions.

Inline commenting

This feature allows anyone to comment inline with the designs you're working on, which sounds like both a blessing and a curse, but it takes the pain out of amends. Now being able to read a comment directly in your design means no more missing feedback and once the amend is done, that’s it: no need to re-upload your prototype, it’s all right there.

Animation

If prototyping wasn’t enough, Figma has recently added ‘Smart Animation’ to the mix, allowing you to quickly create smooth animations and transitions giving your prototypes that extra layer of finish and finesse.

Goodbye Sketch, it’s been emotional

Ok, we still like Sketch and it does still do a few things better than Figma, but right now Figma is in its early days and rolling out features like no tomorrow and we couldn’t be happier with where they’re taking this amazing tool.

So, for now, goodbye Sketch, it’s been emotional.

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