The Future of Drupal 8 Development: Acquia Lightning

  • 2 minute read

With Acquia Lightning, site-builders or developers can build an authoring experience from the ground up in only a few hours.

 

Think of Acquia Lightning as “Drupal Core with afterburners.”

 

Development tasks that used to take days or weeks are condensed to a matter of minutes.

 

At Acquia Engage 2016, John Kennedy, Open Source Product Manager at Acquia, and Adam Hoenich, Acquia Software Engineer, gave a detailed, technical exploration of Lightning for Drupal 8 and a preview of what’s next for Lightning.

 

It’s an energetic session because it contains both a presentation and a report on a “speedrun” that the Lightning team did, live, at DrupalCon Dublin. This speedrun showed exactly how fast one can build an authoring experience using Lightning.

 

The Pokemon-themed site featured in this speedrun was assembled in 45 minutes. Impressive.

 

Along the way, you’ll learn what’s in the newest version of Acquia Lightning: improved layout components with a library that bundles up the drag n’ drop-compatible layouts that ship with Panels. (The Panelizer module makes it incredibly easy -- and safe -- to entrust authors with some degree of layout control.) In addition, new workflow capabilities now help users simplify Drupal’s editorial workflow process.

 

And coming early next year: the Lightning team will introduce the concept of workspaces, where users can separate content entities into semi-isolated groups for easy organization. New preview features will allow users to view everything exactly as it will appear when live on a website—even multiple versions at once.

 

Watch the full presentation, D8 Lightning - The Future of Drupal Development, below: