Drupal has been updated to version 8.0 with the release of the final candidate today, November 19, 2015. The latest version of the open-source CMS has been a long-time work in progress. Drupal 8 provides significant developments to making responsive HTML5 mobile websites (along with the administration back-end) and improvements to the core functionality such as a WYSIWYG built into the Core along with improved accessibility.
In the Drupal projects that I have done, Drupal was selected because it stood out for its page-centric (or nodes) navigation instead of focusing on posts like WordPress. The page building experience gets better with more use of blocks to build pages while the logic capability is even greater with increased field types.
Some other notable changes to Drupal 8.0 included adding Dynamic Page Cache (which doubles Drupal 8’s speed in many use cases) and a Stable base theme to core (to allow us to improve Drupal’s markup in future 8.x releases without breaking themes), removing SafeMarkup::set(), ::checkPlain(), and friends (they were dangerous) and PHPTemplate (it had been superceded by Twig), and switching to a single vendor directory in the root (to allow Composer to be used without modifications).
Almost 3,300 individuals have contributed to Drupal 8 and the milestone is being celebrated around the world with Drupal 8 release parties. Your average website will probably update to Drupal 8 in 2016 while module and theme developers have probably already updated while early adopters will start with today’s release. Examples of Drupal 8 production sites are available in this list on Drupal Groups.
You can see more about Drupal 8 from the press release below and at the release’s website: https://www.drupal.org/8
Drupal 8, a Big Step Forward for Digital Experience Management, Is Available Now
The web’s most powerful and versatile digital experience framework just got better.
PORTLAND, Oregon | November 19, 2015—Today, DrupalTM announced the release of its latest version, Drupal 8. Drupal is the open source, digital experience framework behind millions of websites and applications. It powers many of the web’s most influential platforms. Drupal 8 changes how those platforms create and deliver the world’s best digital experiences.
Digital experience management is an all-day, every day enterprise, and Drupal has long been how companies and organizations keep up. It’s modular software built to support complex digital operations. It’s the platform governments use to share their most important messages (The White House, Australia). It’s the framework for content that entertains (The GRAMMYs, Turner Broadcasting) and content that informs (The Economist, Fox News). It’s also how organizations work for global change (Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International).
“Drupal lets us focus on building an efficient, feature-rich editorial experience so that our editors can focus on creating engaging, relevant content,” said Alexander S. Ross, Director of Software Engineering at NBCUniversal Technology. “We’re excited to use some of the new features in Drupal 8 to embolden our editors even further.”
Drupal 8 improves how organizations deliver content. It also enhances the impact that content has. It’s built from a component-driven perspective: flexible elements, not rigid pages. That helps organizations deliver the personalized relevance people want from digital content. With Drupal 8, content can be exactly what people need where they need it.
“Today we’ve released the biggest update in Drupal’s history. In addition to many usability improvements, Drupal 8 ships with important advances in content modeling and decoupled API-first publishing,” said Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and project lead. “It’s the toolkit organizations need to meet the demand for the fast, flexible, highly-personal digital experiences that are the future of the web. We optimized Drupal 8 for integration with other systems and for orchestrating data-driven experiences that work across devices and channels. More than 3,000 contributors have spent countless hours creating the most scalable, powerful content management system on the market. Drupal 8 changes our community and the web as we know it.”
Drupal 8’s signature feature is its commitment to versatile, structured content. But this flexibility isn’t the only way Drupal 8 helps organizations get the most from their digital platforms. It has more than 200 new and improved features, including:
- Powerful, built-in integration tools to connect Drupal to other software in an organization’s infrastructure
- Easier content creation, using responsively designed interfaces
- Renewed mobile-first focus, so people can create sites and applications that work on more modern devices than ever
- All-new configuration management for safer and faster site development and maintenance
- Improved built-in multilingual support, with the ability to translate any component of the software
Some organizations are already using Drupal 8. Le Temps, Switzerland’s French-language newspaper, uses Drupal 8 to support 4.2 million page views per month. CH2M is a global corporation that works to keep governments, infrastructure, and environments sustainable. It uses Drupal 8 to present and prove its capabilities.
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK), one of the largest cancer centers in the United States, launched the new mskcc.org in May. It chose Drupal 8, even when the software was still in its beta phase, to help extend the reach of its “More Science. Less Fear” campaign.
“Memorial Sloan Kettering researchers and clinicians regularly push boundaries to innovate and generate new knowledge,” said Evan Liebman, MSK’s Director of Online Communications & Technology, “and we wanted to do the same in the digital technology space. It was really important to us to be early adopters and contribute to Drupal 8’s development. With Drupal 8’s object-oriented code and reusable design patterns, we can bypass technical hurdles quickly. Seventy-five percent of our required features and functionality are now in Drupal core, including Views. This means you can build a Drupal 8 site out of the box.”
With 100,000 active contributors, Drupal has one of the largest open source communities in the world. It’s a global community of designers, writers, translators, developers, sponsors, and more. In addition to enhancing Drupal’s core, they work together to extend Drupal with contributed modules, themes, and distributions. Drupal 8 is the latest step in their commitment to continuous improvement, letting organizations everywhere build something amazing for anyone.
About the Drupal Association
The Drupal Association is a non-profit organization. It helps grow the Drupal project and community with funding, infrastructure, events, and promotion. Its vision is to help create spaces where anyone, anywhere, can use Drupal to make the internet a better place. It’s working on inspiring and empowering the web’s makers, thinkers, and doers to do just that.
For more information, contact Drupal Association President Dries Buytaert, or Executive Director Holly Ross.
All third-party company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. We included them only for reference.