What to expect in Drupal 8

Submitted by Lyemium Editorial on 09/30/2012 - 02:38.

1. Drupal 8 With Symfony for a framework

What is Symfony?

Symfony is a PHP Web Development Framework which utilizes the object-oriented architecture of PHP 5.3 for effectiveness. Over the past 5 years Symfony has grown to include a large and vibrant community (with close to 500 contributers for the latest release) of developers, and users. Today there are many projects running Symfony, some of the more popular projects include: Zikula, phpbb and easybook.

What it means for Drupal?

There are a few strategic goals that Symfony 2 enables for the Drupal community. One is that Drupal developers will have to be less concerned with writing basic functionality. Secondly, developers can focus more of their attention on solving practical problems. Leveraging both communities, not only will Symfony in Drupal 8 benefit Drupal as a whole but both communities will thrive as Drupal brings many fixes and new functionality for Symfony in return.

2. The Drupal 8 & Twig Connection

What is Twig?

Twig is a theme engine, fully php, and doesn't require any php extensions where it should run on any host; which is brought to you by Fabien Potencier, the creator of the Symfony framework. Twig is released under the new BSD license.

Twig is a modern template engine for PHP:

Fast: Twig compiles templates down to plain optimized PHP code. The overhead compared to regular PHP code was reduced to the very minimum.

Secure: Twig has a sandbox mode to evaluate untrusted template code. This allows Twig to be used as a template language for applications where users may modify the template design.

Flexible: Twig is powered by a flexible lexer and parser. This allows the developer to define its own custom tags and filters, and create its own DSL.

- http://twig.sensiolabs.org/

What it means for Drupal

The main benefit of bringing Twig to Drupal will be security.

From a designers perspective:

Great syntax - clean, readable, and elegant.
Twig for Template Designers
Less PHP in template files

The Current State

Although Twig is not yet confirmed to be in Drupal 8. There is an active discussion about switching to Twig. Currently there are a few people to actually make this happen. To get Twig into core will require more PHP developers who can do the heavy lifting to integrate Twig into the code base.

3. Drupal 8 Web Services

Another initiative which is highly valued within the Drupal community and making great strides for Drupal 8 is the WSCCI initiative. The idea behind this initative is to transform Drupal from being just another contenment management system heavily focussed on websites to a Content Management Framework which will manage content not only for traditional websites but also for interactive web apps and mobile applications.

Basically, Drupal will act more like an open system to manage content which can be distributed all over the web. Content isn't confined to a website, but can also be exposed to the users through a whole array of applications and devices. This means businesses can manage their content whether it is for their website, tablet or android application.

4. Responsive Design

Today, Drupal 7 included, mobile support has been very limited in Drupal. Brain Fling a pioneer in the mobile industry had gone on to state that:

“There is still no mobile-friendly CMS."

The Drupal Mobile Initiative sets out to change that. There has been a common consensus, that the web is moving towards mobile in giant steps. Drupal will now be working with mobile devices out of the box, and will play better with creating functionality and presentation for mobile platforms.

5. Multilingual Support

Language support has been maturing with each new Drupal release but arguably not at the speed that many had hoped. The multilingual aspect of Drupal used to be one of the weakest points, with many rough edges and workarounds set by architectural limitation.

With Drupal’s core moving to a robust object-oriented programming (OOP) framework, internationalization and multilingual support will make a deeper reach and impact on Drupal 8 and future releases to come.

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