6 Modules to Avoid Before Drupal 8 Arrives

drupal 6 modules

Over the last few months, Dave Reid, one of the most active Drupal developers, has been giving a presentation called “Future-proof your Drupal 7 site”.

Dave talks about decisions you can make now on existing or new Drupal 7 sites to make transitioning to Drupal 8 easier. He comes up with a list of modules that have been backported to Drupal 8. Using those modules means you won’t have to re-train your staff for Drupal 8.

Dave also has some recommendation for modules not to use, because they’ve been replaced by alternative solutions in Drupal 8. Here are 6 modules that may be worth avoiding if want an easier update to Drupal 8 in years to come …

#1. The Node reference or User reference modules

Use the Entity reference module instead: https://www.drupal.org/project/entityreference.

#2. The Phone module

Use the Telephone module instead: https://www.drupal.org/project/telephone.

#3. The Link module

Use the URL module instead: https://www.drupal.org/project/url.

#4. The Services module

Use the RESTful Web Services module instead: https://www.drupal.org/project/restws.

#5. The Date module (some formats)

The Date module is still useful, but make sure to use the Date (ISO format) field type, not the Date or Date (Unix timestamp) field types.

#6. Display Suite

The advice from Dave’s presentation is Austin was not that Display Suite is on the way out. In fact, there’s already an Alpha release of Display Suite for Drupal 8.

Instead, Dave’s advice was that if you use Entity View Modes you’ll stick close to the Drupal 8 core and possibly have an easier update.

10 modules in Drupal 7 won’t move to Drupal 8

There were 10 core modules removed from Drupal 7. Several were merged into other Drupal 8 core modules and several have become stand-alone modules on Drupal.org. This page has specific details of each module’s fate.

  1. Blog
  2. Dashboard
  3. Number
  4. List
  5. OpenID
  6. Overlay
  7. PHP filter
  8. Poll module
  9. Profile
  10. Trigger

Watch the full “Future-proof your Drupal 7 site” video

To get a fuller explanation of all of this, it’s worth watching the video of Dave’s talk. The are several recordings online, but here’s the latest version from DrupalCon Amsterdam:

Author

  • Steve Burge

    Steve is the founder of OSTraining. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Sarasota in the USA. Steve's work straddles the line between teaching and web development.

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Reuben
Reuben
9 years ago

That date module item is very useful information.
The phone module has a different use case to the telephone module and they aren’t always interchangeable depending on your requirements. The phone module has proper phone number validation based on the country and some other advanced features. The telephone module is just a very basic telephone number input.
There is also more to your point about display suite.

Display suite does many things, including allowing configuration of view modes.

If you only use display suite for views modes then you should always use entity view modes instead.

If you also use display suite for other things you still need display suite so you may as well use its view mode functionality.

steve
steve
9 years ago
Reply to  Reuben

Thanks Reuben, great advice all around. Yes, there are possible exceptions to most of the recommendations in this post, except perhaps for Node reference or User reference which definitely should be avoided at this point.

Jean-Francois Bohemier
Jean-Francois Bohemier
9 years ago

About 9. Profile: After reading the linked issue, I gather that using Profile2 is the good way to go…

John Fiala
John Fiala
9 years ago

Note that the Link module is in Drupal 8, so I’m not sure why you’re recommending converting over to use url.

steve
steve
9 years ago
Reply to  John Fiala

Hi John
A good, quick explanation of this is on Reddit: [url=http://www.reddit.com/r/drupal/comments/2inf1q/6_modules_to_avoid_before_drupal_8_arrives/cl42b0m]http://www.reddit.com/r/dru…[/url]

davereid
davereid
9 years ago
Reply to  John Fiala

I wrote it because I continually encountered what seemed to be really strange code and bugs like [url=https://www.drupal.org/node/2055111which]https://www.drupal.org/node…[/url] seemed to be due to the fact that the module’s been ported several times and continually added features, without much cleanup.
Plus basic things like making the URL input itself the most important part of the field widget instead of the title input, which means putting it on the left side, like url module does, instead of the right side which is what link module does.

John Fiala
John Fiala
9 years ago
Reply to  davereid

Well, I’m happy to entertain patches at any time. 🙂 I hadn’t ever thought of moving the fields to put the link on the left, to be honest, that’s not a bad idea although at this point I’m not sure if folks would appreciate me mucking with the ui that much. I don’t mind the url module, as I’ll be the first to admit I’m not very good at maintaining modules.

Antti Vaihia
Antti Vaihia
9 years ago
Reply to  John Fiala

Good to know because as soon as I saw “External links only” I thought that’s like only half the functionality I need from the module.

bechtold
bechtold
9 years ago

I’m not sure if this is a very good idea.

Unless we have the requirements to develop drupal 8 like I would rather use the full potential of drupal 7.
Using url over link caused us some trouble just a week ago. Url can do one and only one thing. Link can do a bit more and there are a multiple plugins for it. So in my opinion currently Link is way better than url in most use cases.
And not using display suite will make a frontend developers and sitebuilders life unnecessary hard. And i don’t see how this should be an advantage.
I’m not sure about the other modules.
To me this article sounds a bit like “If you use win 7 don’t use the start button, because its removed in win 8”
Also updating from drupal 7 to 8 will in most cases require a complete new project anyways. Or should we not use phptemplate in d7 anymore to theme stuff because twig is coming?
And the argument to not re-train the staff is just not valid, as so much changes. I want to see the person, that can blindly use drupal 8 only with d7 knowledge.
Thats my 5 cents, looking forward to yours, to make a full €/$ 🙂

Colin Shipton
Colin Shipton
9 years ago

I can’t help but wonder about Display suite vs. Entity view modes, why would you recommend using a module which is currently only in RC1 which has not been updated for 18 months (even the dev version hasn’t been updated recently) where Display suite is regularly updated and has nearly 10x the number of installs

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