Click here to watch Building a full site in Drupal 8 Alpha

Many changes in the alpha version of Drupal 8 are currently untested “in the wild.” This holds especially true for the D8 multilingual initiative, which brings major process adjustments for building multilingual sites.

Being personally involved in the new multilingual initiative equates to extensive testing on my part. Fortunately, my team and I had the perfect testing scenario: building a fully multilingual site on Drupal 8.

The gist of our D8 story goes something like this:

We began our journey the 2nd of April (2014). And despite a long and bumpy road, we managed to launch our new site the same month on the 29th — in just under 30 days of extensive work. Not only did we make our launch date, we learned A LOT. Now, we would like to share our learnings with you:

- Multilingual Drupal 8: It works and it’s awesome.
- Managing HEAD to HEAD updates without an update path
- The new kid on the block: using Configuration Management and deployments via GIT
- Dealing with a completely missing field of contrib modules. *Spoiler: it made layouting really hard!
- What’s missing in the core theme layer for building full websites
- Which new site-building tasks were confusing and/or challenging to understand
- Bugs in Core!
- Why our experience leads us to believe no-one should fear building sites NOW with Drupal 8.