Drupal 8.0 was released almost a year ago. We have created 3 sites on Drupal 8 during that time.
Many Drupal 8 contrib modules are not ready to use on production sites, they contain bugs and don’t have all the features as the same modules for Drupal 7. Do that is not a reason to despair, not to use these modules at all and to write custom code. We decided to write patches for additional features in required modules and to apply these patches to the modules.
Mostly we didn’t have enough additional functionality for module Effects. Image Effects is a module continued module Imagecache Actions in Drupal 8. The module developers migrated the most functionality from Imagecache Actions to Image Effects, but some features are still not migrated, for example Interlace / Progressive effect.
Image effects: Interlace / Progressive
We think that Interlace must be applied to images in a large number of the sites. The user doesn’t have to wait while an image is fully loaded to see results:
Firstly it applies to big banners, which can change their own height and permanently change scroll bar position on the page. Also this effect looks good on sliders and carousels. We didn’t wait for this effect appeared in Image Effects module and we tried to add the effect.
In the beginning we created a separate module for Interlace / Progressive effect.
But this effect can be used on many sites, so we decided to add it to Image Effects module. We created a patch and uploaded it on drupal.org:
https://www.drupal.org/node/2751175
The effect worked fine, but all the functionality needs testing. We had a trouble with it. Effects work with two different image toolkits GD2 и Imagemagick. But Drupal.org CI uses only GD2 for testing. So our test worked with Imagemagick:
identify -verbose
and we were needed to rewrite it. Some plain PHP code helped us to rewrite tests. So our tests were rewritten and the patch was successfully applied to Image Effects 8.x-1.x module. You can use it starting Image Effects 8.x-1.0-alpha3 version or use dev-version of module 8.x-1.x-dev.
Image Effects: Perspective
Perspective is another effect which is absent in Imagecache Actions and Image effect. It looks like that:
Before:
After:
Perspective effect provides wide settings form. You can use this effect to create symmetric perspective and asymmetric perspective. Also you can choose direction and distortion for a new image.
We are working on a patch for Image Effects:
https://www.drupal.org/node/2762627
and for Imagecache Actions:
https://www.drupal.org/node/2760121
We’ve written some tests which show the effect works correctly. Perspective effect will soon become available in modules Image Effects and Imagecache Actions soon.
Drupal 8 increases your power with new modules, adding new functionality, fixing bugs. You make Drupal 8 sites development faster and painless to take part in contribution for Drupal 8 modules.
