Drupal 8 Stable is not yet released, but its features are frozen and it’s in the process of stabilization. All this allows us to dive deeper into Drupal 8 new features and changes. So, here is what’s new in Drupal 8 for front and back-end, for users and developers.

What’s coming in Drupal 8?

For the beginning we need to highlight that Symfony2, a popular PHP framework, is now part of Drupal core providing many benefits (higher performance, partial page caching and improved multi-lingual support are some of them).

Web services and context core initiative (Whiskey)

There are situations when data must be received and sent between sites and just from a browser. Drupla 8, as a RESTful interface, incorporates the following:

– Machine to machine communication

– Stateless

– Multiple HTTP methods are used depending on the activity – GET for requesting data, POST for creating, PUT for updating and DELETE for removing it.

– Caching – Frequently requested data can be cached.

Universal Unique IDs (UUIDs)

Uniformity of data is one of the improved aspects. The team introduced universal unique ID (UUID) assigned to multiple content types so the development and migration processes will be more streamlined.

Configuration management

Configuration management allows taking a snapshot of overall Drupal configuration at any point of time. For example, when a setting is changed it’ll be saved in config file and database. This feature allows deploying changes via version control.

Improved content editing

D8 supports inline editing with the Spark project implementation. This means that content is updated correctly on a page via AJAX instead of edit forms. Of course, the traditional edit pages will still be present.

It’s expected that the Media module will be moved to core making usage of images and videos easier.

Views in Core

Views in Drupal Core is really great feature. It’s particularly useful for customization.

Responsive themes

With increasing usage of mobile devices it’s important for Drupal to improve its support for them. It is expected the themes to be responsive with changing layouts and presentations depending on the browser and device.

Twig framework template engine

The PHPTemplate is changed with Twig framework engine which is developed by the same team that created Symfony2 framework. This engine allows templates to be compiled down to PHP code stored in the memory improving performances.

Drupal 8 release date

Drupal team hasn’t yet announced the release date of Drupal 8 but they are currently working on API changing (application programming interface). However, stay with us and be informed about all Drupal news.

Conclusion

We all hope that with all these changes building sites with Drupal 8 will become easier.

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