Published on
May 29th, 2016

A lot has changed for me since I started this blog with a post explaining how cool I thought it was to be writing using Jekyll on GitHub. And even since my last post, nearly a year ago, a lot has happened for me.

Pantheon

In September 2015 I was very excited to join Pantheon where I now work as an Agency and Community Engineer. I use my experience as a developer within agencies and as an active member of the Drupal community to do a wide variety of things for Pantheon. I demo Pantheon for agencies considering launching project on our platform. I run advanced trainings for developers already using Pantheon. And I help inform the way we evolves to meet changing community best practices around Drupal development. Also…

WordPress

WordPress! I started as a (semi) professional web developer with WordPress, launching my first sites in 2006. By 2008, I was nearly entirely Drupal-focused. I have now reengaged with WordPress as Pantheon is a platform for both Drupal and WordPress. After going to WordCamp US in December 2015 I was convinced that the differences I had perceived between Drupal and WordPress were entirely overblown. I saw developers building WordPress with similar backgrounds, priorities, and client-bases as are present in the Drupal community. Of course there are still differences but my main take away was that there was a wealth of knowledge to be shared between the two communities.

To that end, my co-worker Andrew Taylor and I presented Lessons from WordPress Core at DrupalCon New Orleans. Our primary message was that Drupal really should look to WordPress since Drupal has passed 8.0.0. Drupal now has scheduled releases that add features and preserve backwards compatibility. WordPress has operated in a similar pattern for years. For more, read my blog post about the presentation or watch the video.

WordPress + Github

When I first started this blog three years ago I was so excited to be using a Jekyll+GitHub. I wrote:

Managing content with git will produce other unexpected modes of collaborating and I’m exciting to have a blog that can be a part of this shift.

Three years later, there has not been much excitement; largely because of my own neglect of this blog. But hope springs eternal! Even on WordPress, this blog remains git-backed. I am using a plugin to sync changes back and forth between WordPress and a GitHub repo.

Migration diary

To recommit (pun intended) to exploring the potential for git-based content, I’ve opened a number of issues in the repo that tracks the blog posts seen here. Over the summer I’ll write a series a of “migration diary” posts that track my progress as I convert nerdologues.com from a Drupal 7 site to a Drupal 8 site. I know a lot of people are doing similar migrations right now. My hope is that this series of posts can be reference for anyone who hits the same pain points I find when doing a migration to Drupal 8.