12 Must know Drupal 8 features!
The digital landscape is changing every day, and with it, pressure on content management systems (CMSs) and organizations to keep pace with customer requirements is increasing. Users expect more personalized experiences, superior connectivity between devices, and more interactive elements in their web experiences. Organizations look for websites that grow with current digital technology and business needs and help you achieve your goals.
Drupal CMS is one of the popularly used open-source content management systems globally, with Drupal 8 being the latest release. Drupal 8 comes with several new and improved features, responsive designed themes, and improved content authoring and multilingual support. Drupal is a leading platform to meet the requirement for interactivity, personalization, and scalable tools. Its powerful built-in modules make it easy to use.
New Features of Drupal 8
1. New Theme Engine
Twig is a brand new theming engine included in Drupal 8, which is PHP-based, flexible, quick, and safe. It is much easier to create beautiful and more functional Drupal websites using Twig, as its templates are written in a syntax that is less complex than a PHP template or others while being more secure.
2. Mobile First Approach
All the built-in themes that are included in Drupal 8 are mobile friendly, responsive, along with an admin theme that can be adjusted to different screen sizes, and a ‘Back To Site’ button to go back to the front page. Tables fit into any screen size without any problem, and the new admin toolbar works best on mobile devices.
3. More of HTML5
When it comes to writing web markup, HTML5 is nowadays the standard and is now available natively in Drupal 8, giving you access to input fields like date, e-mail, phone, etc., and even more functionality and compatibility with mobile and handheld devices.
4. Multilingual
Drupal 8 comes with multilingual features including an admin interface that has built-in translations. Now, you can create pages with language-based Views filtering and block visibility. Translation updates are also available automatically from the community.
5. Manage Your Configuration
Drupal 8 has configuration management built into it at the file-system level so that carrying over configuration elements (like content type, views, or fields, etc.) from local development to the server is a breeze. You can use a version-control system to keep track of configuration changes. Configuration data is stored in files, separate from the site database(s).
6. Easy Authoring
Drupal 8 features bring unparalleled power into the hands of the Content Editor, with WYSIWYG editor CKEditor now bundled with the core. Site and content creators can edit/modify text on any page without having to switch to the entire edit form. Drafts can be easily created, and as a result, web security can be better implemented.
7. Quick Edits
Using Quick Edit, which is a back port of the Drupal 8 in-place editing for Fields, you can easily and directly make edits. Therefore, you can edit the text directly for quick fixes and additions from the front-end.
8. Views is now Part Of Core
In the Drupal module hierarchy, Views sit high up and are an integral part of several website projects, and a lot is impossible without it. Site designers have used use this hitherto-contributed module to output galleries, graphs, maps, lists, tables, posts, menus, reports, blocks. With this Drupal 8 feature, Views is part of and tightly integrated with the core. The front page and some administration pages are now Views, and users will now be able to quickly create pages, blocks, admin sections, etc., and easily modify the existing ones.
9. Better Support For Accessibility
Drupal 8 has an excellent support for industry standard accessibility technologies, like WAI-ARIA. ARIA Live Announcements API and TabManager are noteworthy improvements in Drupal 8, which offer control for rich Internet applications. Bells and whistles like better font sizes, tweaked color contrasts, jQuery UI’s autocomplete, and modal dialogs go a long way towards making Drupal 8 easy to use.
10. Built-In Web Services
You can now use Drupal 8 as a data source, and output content as JSON or XML. You can even post data back to Drupal 8 from the front end. Hypertext Application Language (HAL) has been included in Drupal 8 that makes better utilization of web service capabilities.
11. Fields Galore
Drupal 8 comprises loads of field types in the core, thus, its content structure capabilities are at new heights. New field types such as link, entity reference, date, e-mail, telephone, etc., assist content creation, and now you can attach these fields to more content types, as well as create custom contact forms by attaching fields to them.
12. JavaScript Automated Testing
Automated testing is not possible for front-end, so JaveScript (JS) automated testing is now possible with Drupal 8.1. Now QA'ers can test the JavaScript front-end automatically, that will save time and make continuous integration much easier.
About Raybiztech
Raybiztech is a leading Global Information Technology (IT) Services and Solutions, a CMMI Level 3, ISO 27001:2013 Certified Company. We are a Member of NASSCOM, HYSEA, NJTC, and AIIA. Raybiztech offers comprehensive end-to-end IT Services for Business Application Development, Enterprise Solutions, Enterprise Collaboration Services, Testing and Quality Assurance Services, Cloud Computing and IT Infrastructure Management to organizations in the Banking & Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Media & Entertainment, Leisure & Travel, Telecom and Energy & Utilities verticals as well as Independent Software Vendors.
