At least 20 people helped push one or more issues forward in Montpellier, at the Drupal Dev Days Performance Sprint!

Here’s an overview of what we set out to do, what we did, and what the next steps are.

After more than a year and probably hundreds of patches, yesterday it finally happened! As of 13:11:56 CET, April 8, 2015, Drupal 8 officially has page caching enabled by default![^1] And not the same page caching as in Drupal 7: this page cache is instantly updated when something is changed.

The hundreds of patches can be summarized very simply: cache tags, cache tags, cache tags. Slightly less simple: cacheability metadata is of vital importance in Drupal 8. Without it, we’d have to do the same as in Drupal 7: whenever content is created or a comment is posted, clear the entire page cache. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds! But without that metadata, it simply isn’t possible to do better.¹

I’ve been working on this near-full time since the end of 2013 thanks to Acquia, but obviously I didn’t do this alone — so enormous thanks to all of you who helped!

This is arguably the biggest step yet to make Drupal Fast By Default. I hate slow sites with a passion, so you can probably see why I personally see this as a big victory :)

I’m working on making Drupal 8 faster as part of my job at Acquia. The focus has been on render caching¹², which implies that cacheability metadata is of vital importance in Drupal 8.

To be able to render cache all things that can possibly be render cached, Drupal 8 code must:

• set the right cache max-age — to ensure only the cacheable parts of the page are cached
• set the right cache contexts — to ensure content is varied as expected (per language, per role, per timezone, per user …)
• set the right cache tags — to ensure rendered content is invalidated when the data it depends on is modified

Before Drupal 8, approximately zero attention was given to cacheability of the rendered content: everything seen on a Drupal 7 page is rendered dynamically, with only the occasional exception.

By flipping that around, we make developers more conscious about the output they’re generating, and how much time it takes to generate that output. This in turn allows Drupal 8 to automatically apply powerful performance optimizations, such as:

This year, Performance Planet did an advent calendar again, just like the last few years. I also contributed an article — what follows is a verbatim copy of my “The real challenge: making the entire web fast” article for the 2013 Performance Calendar.

Probably many — if not most — of us speed freaks work for big companies that are optimizing top 1,000 websites.
Some companies have the budgets to hire people who work on WPO full time. Those companies are able to do that thanks to huge revenues — otherwise it would not be financially justifiable. In other words: they’re probably a top 1,000 website. The percentages of page speed improvements those people bring must translate into sufficient additional revenue to cover their wages.
Other companies have people who get to spend part of their time on WPO, and maybe pay for the services of one of the several WPO companies out there. But even in this case, a sizeable revenue is a requirement to justify it.

So what about the millions of other websites?

What?

This article proposes a novel, simpler way of managing Drupal sites (where “managing” in this case is solely code updating & deployment).

It relies on only one command-line tool: mr (“a Multiple Repository management tool”, http://joeyh.name/code/mr/), plus a Drupal plug-in for that tool: mr-drupal, https://github.com/wimleers/mr-drupal.

Why?

If you run Drupal sites, you need some way to manage them; some way to keep them up-to-date. As of Drupal 7, there’s a built-in update manager, but it doesn’t use a VCS.

Most likely, you want use a VCS to manage your Drupal site. You may be downloading tarballs and checking their contents into your VCS, or maybe you’re using git submodules or even git-subtree. For all of these, there’s a whole lot of process, a lot of steps, a lot to learn, and a lot of tricky things you have to think about each time you want to update something. Too much that can go wrong.

Drupal 8 will ship with big authoring experience improvements: WYSIWYG editing & in-place editing, thanks to the Spark distribution that Acquia — my employer — is sponsoring.

But how well does it fare with the growing importance of structured content? Do Drupal 8’s WYSIWYG & in-place editing enable it or prevent it?

The new web world order: many form factors

The Big Thing of the last few years: the advent of mobile. Inherent to that: websites that are optimized for mobile devices and act as data providers for apps.

A new form factor — mobile devices — changed web development forever. Before mobile, the life of web developers and authors (content creators) was relatively simple: make sure websites work well on a few typical screen sizes (let’s deny the existence of Internet Explorer 6 and all the misery it caused).

But … we cannot predict what’s next. We cannot predict new content consumption form factors. That’s where content strategy becomes vitally important:

content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design