Drupal aims at providing complex functionalities in simplest of ways. Used by giants like NBC, Tesla, Harvard and Princess Cruises, Drupal recently released Drupal 8 Core packed with new features and improvisations on the previous ones. Here are ten completely new features which have entered the Drupal family:
In the previous editions of CKEditor, there was no text editor. The main purpose is to allow extension of the UI on text fields where HTML input is permitted. In the absence of Text Editor, you can only enter text and the formatting has to be done manually (for instance: <strong> for bold and <em> for italics). With the text editor, you can easily enter formatted text. The Text Editor includes an in-place editing support, image dialog and link dialog.
In the earlier versions, explanations of Drupal’s functionalities were placed in the Help link. To make the support easily accessible, it has been placed in the “Tour” link where one can learn the different features through pop-ups (“tooltips”). You can use Tools for two main aims: to walk the user through a workflow and also to shift their attention to core parts of the interface.
The main point of using Web Services is to enable external apps to communicate with our app. The most common forms of communication are updating, reading, deleting and creating resource. REST is a prominent way in which Web Services are made to work. Other forms like SOAP and XML-RPC are also available. But REST is the standard format for Drupal.
One could only make a webservice on Drupal 7 with the help of a series of contributory modules. However, with Drupal 8, the core includes all the required packages. You can enable the Webservices module through the menu “Views” following which you can instantly create a REST export. Originally, four forms of web services are available: HTTP Basic Authentication, Serialization, HAL and RESTful Web Services.
In the Drupal 8 core, you can add in extra fields. Here are the components to which you can add fields: taxonomy terms, nodes, comments, users, blocks and contact form. There are subtle changes in Fields functionality of Drupal 8 Core. The “Field” options are classed into: Number, General, Reference and Text (off-the-screen). The English used previously for the field names could have struck as complex to many- now, it has been simplified (for instance- “Number” instead of “Integer”). In Drupal 8 Core, you can use Comments as a field, than as a setting.
With the Quick Edit option, you can make changes to the content of your website from the front-end itself. The catch is that it permits you to edit any content object (custom blocks, nodes and others) in-place. You don’t have to visit the back-end for making any changes to the content entities. In the default mode, small forms are used for editing the fields. For enhanced experience, modules can be used for optimizing in-place editors. No form is required for editing the plain text fields. Body fields can be edited without the use of any form once the Text Editor and CKEditor modules are installed.
A majority of the administration screens on Drupal 8 Core utilize Views. This makes customization an easy process. Along with this, once Views has been introduced within the Core, there is higher support for it through the Help section and Drupal.org documents.
Apart from the capacity to add more fields to the pre-existent components, Drupal 8 Core introduces 5 new fields, namely: Link, Date, Reference, Email and Telephone. When you install Drupal 8 Core, you will need to enable the fields. There is no need to install any extra modules to use them.
The main motive of responsive images is to load images which are sized for the different screen sizes (depending on their breakpoints). This allows the website to load faster owing to the image size optimization. The images could be automatically resized in the core with Drupal 7 through image styles. Drupal 8 Core evolves ahead and introduces the option to select varying styles for each of the images. The different styles can be used for screen sizes on different images.
In Drupal 8, there are different kinds of information, namely: State, Content, Cache, Configuration and Session. With the Configuration Manager, you can choose to store in either the Simple Configuration mode or as Configuration entities. The newly enhanced Configuration Manager makes it easy to import and export the required features. Suppose you build a new content type, then you can export it into the test site and eventually, import it to the live site easily. Provided the configurations are on the same site, you can deploy them from one environment to the other without difficulty.
With Drupal 7, when you install the multilingual edition, you will also need to install many other modules. The Drupal 8 Core makes use of only 4 main modules (Content Translation, Language, Interface Translation, Configuration Translation). You can begin to translate your website once the four modules are enabled. Armed with an easy-to-use language configuration, the multi-lingual feature comes with automatic updates and downloads, free positioning of the language selector and an overview screen for the translators (along with contextual translation tabs for site developers).
Please write to services@suyati.com to know more about Drupal 8.