Drupal 8 is huge. For the first time, we’ve gotten off the “Drupal Island” in a big way. Core now brings in key components from the broader PHP community. We’ve brought in Twig for theming, Composer for dependency management, and PHPUnit for testing. For the first time at any Drupalcon -- now less than a week away! -- we have a Symfony track highlighting our new core components.

If all that seems intimidating, relax! FFW and Propeople have you covered with our Symfony training and Drupal 8 sessions!

On Monday, join me, Jesus Olivas the author of Drupal Console, and Ray Saltini for Introduction to Symfony 2: Getting Ready for Drupal 8. At this all day paid training, you’ll get hands on experience with Symfony core components and build your first Symfony based site. With our no-coder-left-behind strategy, you’ll always be one git checkout away from catching up with your classmates. You’ll learn about how a Symfony application is structured, how to define routes and use controllers, use Twig for output, define services and use dependency injection. In the afternoon, we’ll connect this all back to Drupal by examining a Drupal 8 module. Have a development environment and a web server ready, and we’ll see you on Monday! As an added bonus you'll get an extra entry in our Drupalcon Barecelona giveaway.

What to know more about Drupal 8 modules? Join me for Capture the Drupal 8 Flag. We’ll start with a brief personal journey that led me from core patches to porting the Flag module to  Drupal 8. You’ll see how I approached the porting effort, what resources I used, and how Flag 8.x evolved throughout the development process. We’ll discuss some lessons I learned, pitfalls, and how you can avoid them. You’ll even see how to use Drupal Console create most of Flag module in less than five minutes. Really.

Given how huge a change Drupal 8 is, it’s understandable that a considerable amount of fear, uncertainty, and doubt has been created over the last few years. We can do better. Join me in the core conversations track for Fighting Core FUD: We Need a Contrib Champion. You’ll see how Examples for Drupal 8 uncovered a divide between core and contrib developers, and the FUD that happens when things change. In it, I’ll propose a solution based on the Cloud Champion -- a proven way to roll out large and intimidating changes.

Don’t forget to catch Jesus’s session on Drupal Console, Matt Korostoff’s session on Drupalgeddon, and others by the largest Drupal consultancy on the planet. See you there!