Drupal 8 Release Is Today! Everything You Need To Know
November 19th – It’s officially Drupal 8 everywhere day! Being hard core Drupal lovers, we can’t stop thinking, working and talking of Drupal. With more than four years in the making and over 3,300 developers, Drupal 8 is going to awesome.
A lot of hard work, brainstorming technologies, and scores of innovative ways to seamlessly integrate a new content management experience is now finally available. With over 200 new features and improvements, we can’t wait to share the most interesting new functions of Drupal 8 with our beloved clients. Here are some of our favorites!
Go Mobile With Drupal 8
Great news! Drupal 8 is 100% responsive. This makes it easy for managing content from any device. Going forward, mobile is definitely taking a lead in technology. From a big screen to a small screen, a lot of variations in a website can be noticed, such as differences in images, menus, buttons and the entire look and feel. Now you can edit your content and manage your site on a small screen anytime, anywhere. Drupal 8’s mobile friendly features on site building, administration and content development are new benchmarks in the CMS world.
Speak Any Language
With over 1.2 million websites around the world, with Drupal 8 it’s possible to translate your website to any language. This built-in interface allows easy translation and really enhances your global presence. With D8, you can install more than 94 languages, language detection abilities, and much more to make a global impression. You’ll notice a much more streamlined and a well integrated translation module, bridging the linguistic gaps.
Twig – The Themes Specialist
This Twig theming engine is another distinct feature of Drupal 8. Besides adapting several components from Symfony2, Twig has its proven its reliability and is now known as being the fastest theme engine. High security, flexibility, simplified usage, customizing ability and consistency are the highlights of Twig template.
Smarter Content Authoring And Management
With the new CKEditor WYSIWYG editor, content editing and managing has never been easier. You can easily save the draft and use the option of in-place editing, which allows the editors to edit on the front-end rather than having to access the back-end each time. Also, Drupal 8 comes with a drag-and-drop admin interface for adding and removing buttons in the WYSIWYG toolbar. Additionally, there is Drupal Image, Drupal Image captioning and Webkit Resize plug-ins which reduces the dependencies faced in earlier versions. CKEditor’s widgets feature was developed exclusively for Drupal. This makes Drupal 8 an amazing experience for websites visitors.
No More Waiting For Ages To Load Pages
Nobody wants to wait for your website to load. Instant loading is the key aspect to impress your visitors. As mentioned earlier, Drupal 8 has transitioned to the Symfony2 framework. This guarantees a smoother performance and faster loading experience for your visitors. It has also decreased the amount of run-time memory. Drupal 8 is fast. Very fast.
Configuration Made Better And Simpler
Drupal 8’s configuration management uses YAML format for text files. The configuration manager module gives a simplified experience to ease the importing and exporting configurations. You also have the comfort of verifying your changes in the development, staging and production environment. Compared to the previous versions, Drupal 8 has made deployment and synchronizing features as flexible as possible.
Magic Of HTML5
HTML 5 is another major advantage of Drupal 8. As we know, HTML5 is for sure the future of the web. Some of the phenomenal features: Multimedia support, custom data attributes, ability of end-users to effortlessly edit HTML control’s content, user interface enhancements, easier front end applications, new front-end libraries and helpers and much more. Drupal 8 is full of all these amazing features.
Views In Drupal 8 Core
As the most used contribute module, Views are an added advantage, especially to non-developers. With its easily structured architecture, you can customize the administration pages, use filters and more. The main objective of Views module is to help organize a content system the way you want, without any code. Drupal 8 with the enhanced Views module helps you create out of the box sites for your customers.
How Do I Migrate To Drupal 8?
Migration is now easier than ever with Drupal 8. Migration modules have been upgraded to be a lot more user-friendly. However, if you have a lot of custom modules and code, you will need some help.
And that’s where we come in! Contact us today to talk about migrating to Drupal 8. It will transform the way your website looks and does business. Click here to know more!
The Impending Bad News For Drupal 6
In case you didn’t know, Drupal 6 (which is almost 8 years old) will no longer be supported by the Drupal Community. The cut-off date: February, 2016. Thus, if you’re still running on Drupal 6, you’ll want to update your website soon. Very soon. Check out our Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 fact sheet for all the reasons why you should upgrade to D8. Or contact us today!