firebase port is not straightforward. Firebase-element uses observers to detect changes for auto-save, and the observers are not used in 0.8. I would not start porting until I fully understand 0.8 data flow.
As for your question:
In 0.5, property binding used observers. Which was lovely, the model and the editor did not need to know anything about each other, everything just worked
In 0.8, property binding is implemented using custom events to broadcast poperty changes. Native tags like <input> do not broadcast these custom events. So, you'd have to do something like this:
<input on-change='handleChange'>
handleChange: function() {
firebaseElement.setPath('
data.name', this.$.input.value);
}
Which is a lot more verbose than it used to be. This area is still in a lot of flux.
Aleks