Fields and Entities: the good, the bad and the ugly

Speaker(s):

Drupal 7 shipped with a wonderful tool for site builders: Fields. It also shipped with a far enhanced API behind it with respect to what CCK used to provide in Drupal 6. Despite all the thoughts and discussions gone behind Field API's design, the resulting system was incomplete, since it was based on the concept of entity, which was a late guest at D7 core party. Moreover the achieved developer experience (DX) was (and is) suboptimal, just to use a polite word: ever wondered how to deal with all that language stuff coming out from everywhere?

The Entity API project was started to fill the holes in the core entity system and help dealing in a sane way with entity fields and properties (and much more, by the way).

After a couple of years of experience we are now working again on Drupal core. The good guys are fighting hard to bring a full-fledged entity system in D8 and provide to Drupal developers a wonderful experience when dealing with fields and properties. And keep language stuff working in the process, since it seems it's not so bad after all.

Are you willing to learn the best practices to work with Fields and Entities in D7 and how your life will change in D8? Come and hear the full story. As a bonus you will have the unique chance to throw a sharp object against the guy responsible for all this language mess. Don't miss it!

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