Drupal 8 development – finding API changes through Drupal’s Change Records

When tackling a new framework or program code, in attempt to contribute and join the development effort, one may find it difficult to navigate through the set of APIs. That’s where documentation comes in. This is the case with new comers to Drupal‘s 8th development branch as well, except we don’t really have an official documentation up and ready at our disposal. While there are blog reviews covering different parts of Drupal 8 development you might find the most important or at least up to date information that you need at Drupal’s Change Records.

The Change Records are somewhat of a changelog list which is a bit more elaborate and may specify when was the change introduced, any open issues with it, where is its impact through-out the system and even examples of making use of the new API, if present.

Taking Drupal’s 8 version of the hook_init() implementation we can browse to https://drupal.org/node/2013014 in search for that API, so for the keyword we can simply type-in init and while we can further tune the search parameters it is probably not necessary as this is a very focused area. Once running the search we can find the desired API change dating back to 05-Jun-2013 on Drupal’s 8.x version and hope the information on the change record is good enough to answer our needs.