Every time a new version of Drupal comes out the big question is always, should I build my site in the new version now, or build it in the older stable version of Drupal and wait a while for the new version to cool down? How long should I wait? And will I experience Drupal's version of buyer's regret: finishing my site in the old version of Drupal just in time to see everyone else building the on the new release?

In the past, "common wisdom" has tended to be more on the wait-and-see side of things rather than dive-right-in. But even in advance of a beta version of Drupal 8 (still in alpha as of this writing) there are already sites live on the web today built on Drupal 8.

Are they just crazy? What kind of risk do I introduce to my project if I start building it in Drupal 8? How can I minimize it? And can you just please tell me whether to use Drupal 8 for my site today or to use Drupal 7?

In this session we will ask the question:

Should I build my new website in Drupal 7 or Drupal 8?

And we'll answer it with a resounding:

Yes!

We will demonstrate a new workflow we're already using to simultaneously build a site in Drupal 7 and Drupal 8, using automated site conversion and migration tools.

By combining IMP (content migration), Twigify (theme upgrade) and Coder/Drupalate (modules) you can build a site once, and have 2 different versions of it: one running on Drupal 7, and one running on Drupal 8 (currently in alpha.)

That is, we're building our site now in Drupal 7, and automating its conversion to Drupal 8 in near real time.

In fact, we're already seeing advantages of this approach, since instead of changing every single site codebase every time Drupal 8 is updated, changes are only required to the underlying toolset, which is then rerun against any Drupal 7 sites to automatically upgrade them to Drupal 8.

As we demonstrate how this process works, we will explain the underlying APIs that are being leveraged. So, far from a black box approach of a magic tool that hides the internals from you, we'll use a white box approach where you understand the mechanics from end-to-end, but are spared the tedium of repetitious work.

Combining these upgrade tools with standard deployment utilities, we'll show how this results in a site development process that's fully automated and allows you to keep up with Drupal 8 development, while minimizing risk, and preparing you for the full onslaught of upgrading all your sites to Drupal 8.

Some restrictions apply.