Click here to watch Blocks from drop.org to Drupal 8 and beyond.

A basic building block (!) of Drupal sites, the humble block was already present in drop.org, before Drupal 1.0 ; 12 years later, after many changes, it is still with us in Drupal 8 and presumably Drupal 9 too.

This session highlights how the block API and the underlying concepts evolved from one version to the next, through the way blocks were defined and implemented, back from the earliest pre-Drupal 1 version to the latest Drupal 8 available on the day before DrupalCon. We will see why these changes existed, to match growing expectations from both developers/hackers and users/site builders.

The goals of this session is to help developers newly come to Drupal 8 understand the logic behind the new block API in D8, and more generally to provide coders developing new code for Drupal sites with insights on how to prepare their new code to be more ready for future evolutions, includign Drupal 9, while keeping in line with the IAGNI principle.