Today, finally, I installed the first release candidate of Drupal 8. A quick comparison shows: the root directory of Drupal 8 has lost weight. Not much, but still.
Trembling with expectation I started the installation process but it didn’t take long until Drupal showed me the little orange triangle with the exclamation mark. Apparently, the PHP OPcache caching extension was not enabled. What on earth.
According to php.net this extension is bundled with PHP 5.5.0 and later and does the following:
“OPcache improves PHP performance by storing precompiled script bytecode in shared memory, thereby removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.”
Improving performance is always good.
If you use MAMP enabling the extension is easy. Click on “Preferences” –> “PHP” and in the “Cache” drop down menu select OPcache. Done!
Or so I thought. Enabling OPcache in MAMP had no effect. After clicking on the “retry” link the page refreshed – with the same warning still showing. Luckily, Drupal let me continue the installation using the “continue anyway” link. I am running Drupal 8 now, but, by extension, a bit confused.