I recently had time to install and take a look at Drupal 8. I am going to share my first take on Drupal 8 and some of the hang-ups that I came across. I read a few other blog posts that mentioned not to rely too heavily on one source for D8 documentation with the rapid changing pace of D8 the information has become outdated rather quickly.

##Getting Started My first instinct was to run over to drupal.org and grab a copy of the code base and set it up on MAMP. Then I saw an advertisement for running Drupal 8 on Acquia Cloud Free and decided that would probably be a great starting point. Running through the setup for Acquia took only about eight minutes. This was great, having used Acquia and Pantheon before this was an easy way to get started.

Next, I decided to pull down the code and get it running locally so that I could start testing out adding my own theme. Well... What took 8 minutes for Acquia took relatively longer for me.

##Troubleshooting and Upgrading The first roadblock that I ran into was that my MAMP was not running the required version of PHP ( 5.5.9 or higher) and I decided to upgrade to MAMP 3 to make life a little bit nicer. After setting up MAMP from scratch and making sure the other projects that I had installed with MAMP still work correctly I was able to continue with the site install.

The second roadblock that I came across was not having Drush 7+ installed. It doesn't come out and say in the command line that you need to upgrade Drush (it does in the docs on drupal.org and if you search the error it is one of the first results). It just spits out this error:

Fatal error: Class 'Drupal\Core\Session\AccountInterface' not found in .../docroot/core/includes/bootstrap.inc on line 64
Drush command terminated abnormally due to an unrecoverable error.

The next roadblock was that I was trying to clear cache with Drush and didn't bother to read the documentation on drupal.org that outlined that drush cc all no longer exists and is replaced by drush cr. Drush now uses the cache-rebuild command. However, this is not exactly clear given that if you run drush cc all you get the same exact error as the one above.

Finally everything was setup and working properly. I decided to look around for a good guide to jumpstart getting the theme setup and landed here at this Lullabot article. For the most part, the article was straight forward. Some parts didn't work and I skipped and others didn't work and I tried to figure out why. Here is the list of things that I couldn't figure out:

• Drush wouldn't change the default theme (complained about bootstrap level even though I was in my docroot)
• Stylesheets-remove didn't work inside of my theme.info.yml file
• Specifying my CSS in my theme.libraries.yml file seemed to be problematic but got it working after some time. (probably user error)

##Conclusion Drupal 8 looks clean and feels sleek and slimmed down. I'm really excited for the direction that Drupal is headed. Overall the interface within Drupal hasn't changed too drastically (maybe some naming conventions ie. extend over modules). It looks like one of our current sites running Panopoly which has a great look and feel over out-of-the-box D7. I really like the simplicity of separating out yml files for specific needs and setting up the theme.

I look forward to writing more blog posts about Drupal 8 and maybe some tutorials and insights. Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the comments section below.