A couple days ago, I received the first in a series of white papers created by the Drupal Association to help Drupal service providers prepare for (and arguably market) Drupal 8.

The paper briefly touches on a number of topics that highlight the benefits of Drupal 8: better usability, mobile-first design, better performance, easier migration and a new release cycle, multilingual capabilities, REST API built into Core, simpler and more accessible theming layer, and more.

All of these are really great, but none of these are particularly surprising.

The surprise was the acknowledgment that this new version of Drupal, because it aligns itself with current PHP programming standards, will help to thwart the notorious Drupal talent gap – the ongoing insatiable demand and search for quality Drupal developers.

This is most refreshing for a small technology-focused team like ours: Drupal 8 “opens up Drupal development to established OOP PHP developers without major retraining.” This means that it will help us find and to work with good PHP developers who may not be super familiar with Drupal. It will also allow us to re-align our internal practices (historically Drupal-focus) toward a more diverse number of technology options and ultimately provide the best technology match for realizing our clients visions.

Working with Drupal has always somewhat felt like having to choose between the blue and the red pill. No more. Now we can believe whatever we want to believe and stay in Wonderland.