Catching Up On Drupal 8

By: Lyemium Editorial | March 5, 2013

A brief overview of what to expect in Drupal 8.

Since our last Drupal 8 update many changes have been made including a feature freeze and a code freeze. In that time frame a lot of great features have arrived in Drupal 8.

Out with the old

First the old modules link has been renamed to "extend". This subtle name change paves way for a much deeper approach to Drupal. The new features, many of which are a result of several Drupal 8 initiatives; of those initiatives the news modules that will be shipped with Drupal 8 are:

15 New Modules

Actions: Perform tasks on specific events triggered within the system.
Ban: Enables banning of IP addresses.
Breakpoint: Manage breakpoints and breakpoint groups for responsive designs.
Configuration manager: Allows administrators to manage configuration changes.
E-mail: Defines a field type for e-mail addresses.
Entity Translation: Allows entities to be translated into different languages.
History: Records which user has read which content.
JSON-LD: Serializes entities using JSON-LD format.
Language: Lets you configure a number of languages to be used on your website and provides language negotiation functionality.
Layout: Makes it possible to swap different page layouts.
Picture: Provides an image formatter and breakpoint mappings to output responsive images using the HTML5 picture tag.
RESTful Web Services: Exposes entities and other resources as RESTful web API.
Views: Create customized lists and queries from your database.
Views UI: Administrative interface for Views.
XML-RPC: Provides XML-RPC functionality.

5 New Fields

Date
E-mail
Entity Reference (allows linking to other content and users and more on your site)
Link
Telephone Number

Views in Drupal 8

One of the major additions to Drupal 8 core is views. If you're used to views from Drupal 7 then you'll feel comfortable with views for Drupal 8, many of the features you've grown to love will still be there; as there is no noticeable difference in design or features.

New Features

Toolbar

Drupal 8 has a new toolbar that's considerably shorter and more concise than anything we've seen in previous versions. The toolbar also includes icons for the first time.

Desktop

Mobile

mobile version

Creating Content

Drupal 8 has a new content creation interface. Whereas in Drupal 7, the content settings where underneath the content, they've now been moved to sliders on the right-hand side.

content creation

You will also notice a WYSIWYG editor. As of Drupal 8 CKEditor will be come shipped with core. By default this module is disabled but can be enabled through Extend > CKEditor. Then Configurations > Text Formats and configuring the options (Filtered HTML, Full HTML, Plain Text)

Only 9 buttons are turned on by default, but you can add many more:

Inline Editing

One of the most exciting new features in Drupal 8 is inline editing. To activate inline editing click on the edit link. From the drop down menu click Quick Edit:

Click on the field you would like to edit and you can now edit on the fly.

With that in mind. If you would like to dive into the world of Drupal 8 right now you can download the development snapshot at drupal.org