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3 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
Angela Byron is an open source
evangelist whose work includes
reviewing and committing
Drupal core patches, supporting
community contributors,
coordinating with the Drupal.
org infrastructure team, and
evangelizing Drupal. She is also a
Drupal 8 core committer. Angela
is the lead author of O’Reilly’s first
Drupal book, entitled Using Drupal.
Angie is known as “webchick” on
drupal.org.
Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire —
Evangelist, Developer Relations
at Acquia—is a memorable and
charismatic communicator with a
strong following at the intersection
of open source software, business,
and culture. He is a frequent
keynote speaker at events around
the world. He writes and talks
about technology, community, and
more on weekly podcasts and as a
blogger on dev.acquia.com.
Introduction
Drupal 8 has a lot in store for you, whatever you do with Drupal. This ebook will enumerate the major changes, features, and updates in
Drupal 8–and specifically Drupal 8.1–for service providers and end users, site builders, designers, theme- and front-end developers, and for
module and back-end developers.
Note that the Drupal community has moved to a new “semantic versioning” release system. Unlike previous major versions of Drupal, starting
with Drupal 8, a new “minor” version will be released every six months–Drupal 8.0.x, 8.1.x, 8.2.x, and so on. And these versions can include
backwards-compatible new features and functional improvements (which was not possible in Drupal 7 and below), alongside the expected
bug fixes, that are released in “patch” releases between minor versions, for example as Drupal 8.1.1, 8.1.2, and so on.
While the focus of this ebook is firmly on Drupal 8.1, for those familiar with Drupal 7.x, it includes some comparisons to Drupal 7 functionality
and references to Drupal 7 equivalents of Drupal 8 features–for example, Drupal 7 contributed modules.
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4 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
Authoring Experience
A major area of focus in Drupal 8 was around the out-of-the-box experience for
content authors and editors—the folks who actually use a Drupal website every day.
Here are some of the changes you’ll see.
Spark
Spark is an Acquia
initiative created by Dries
Buytaert to improve
Drupal core’s default
authoring experience.
The Acquia development
team for Drupal core
analysed both proprietary
and open source
competitors to Drupal
and worked hard to make
usability enhancements to Drupal core over the course of the release in collaboration
with other Drupal core contributors. They also created back ports of key Drupal 8
UX improvements for Drupal 7, which allowed them to be tested and improved
under everyday, real use even before the release of Drupal 8.
WYSIWYG Editor
Drupal 8 ships with the CKEditor WYSIWYG editor in the default installation. In
addition to supporting what you’d expect in a WYSIWYG editor—buttons for bold,
italic, images, links, and so on—it supports extras, such as easily editable image
captions, thanks to CKEditor’s new Widgets feature, developed specifically for
Drupal’s use. It is fully integrated into Drupal 8, from user roles and permissions
to image management, and it ensures that we keep the benefits of Drupal’s
structured content concepts in our WYSIWYG implementation.
Drupal 8 also sports a drag-
and-drop admin interface for
adding and removing buttons
in the WYSIWYG toolbar, which
automatically syncs the allowed
HTML tags for a given text format,
vastly improving usability. Buttons
are contained in “button groups”
with labels that are invisible to
the naked eye, but that can be
read by screen readers, providing
an amazing, accessible editing
experience for visually impaired
users.Though core will only support CKEditor, Drupal 8’s Editor module wraps
around the WYSIWYG integration, so other libraries and contrib modules can be
tightly integrated as well.
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5 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
In-place Editing
In Drupal 7, if you need
to make a correction on
a website—for example,
a typo, or a missing
image—you must use a
back-end form, which is
visually separated from the
front-end website where
content will appear. The
Preview button doesn’t
help, because the results
of preview are shown in the administrative theme (twice, in case you missed it the
first time).
Drupal 8’s in-place editing feature allows editors to click into any field within a piece
of content, anywhere it appears on the front-end of the site and edit it right there,
without ever visiting the back-end editing form. Full node content, user profiles,
custom blocks, and more are all editable in-place as well.
To replace Drupal 7’s default editing behavior, which required a more time-consuming
visit to the administrative back-end of the site, this in-place editing feature has been
backported to Drupal 7 as the Quick Edit module.
Redesigned Content Creation Page
A community-led
effort from Drupal’s
Usability team resulted
in a redesigned content
creation page in Drupal 8.
It contains two columns:
one for the main fields (the
actual “content” part of your
content) and another for the
“extras”—optional settings
that are used less often. The
new design lets content authors focus on the task at hand while having important
publishing options just a click away.
Refreshed Admin
Theme
The administrative theme
in Drupal 8 is a visually
refreshed version of Drupal
7’s, based on a formal
style guide which can
also be used by module
developers and others
concerned about backend
usability.
Draft Support in Core
A draft revision-state for content is now has API support under-the-hood in Drupal 8
core. This will make publishing-workflow modules, like Workbench, much easier to
implement in Drupal 8 and beyond.
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6 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
Mobile Experience
A huge amount of work has gone into making Drupal 8 “mobile friendly.” Drupal 8 is
able to support site visitors needs as they surf the web on their tablets and phones,
as well as enabling authors and editors to actually work productively on their sites
from mobile devices.
Mobile First
Drupal 8 has been designed with mobile in mind, from the installer to the modules
page. Even new features, such as in-place editing, are designed to work on the
smallest of screens. Give Drupal 8 a try on your device of choice, and let us know
what you think.
The new search box on the modules page adds to your Drupal-8-on-mobile
experience by saving you a lot of scrolling when you need to get to the settings for a
particular module. Check out Module Filter for a similar experience in Drupal 7.
Responsive-ize ALL Things (Themes, Images, Tables…)
To support the unimaginable array of Internet-enabled devices coming in the next 5+
years, Drupal 8 incorporates responsive design into everything it does.
For starters, all core themes are now responsive and automatically reflow elements,
such as menus and blocks, to fit well on mobile devices (if the viewport is too narrow,
horizontal elements will switch to a vertical orientation instead). Images that show up
large on a desktop shrink down to fit on a tablet or smartphone, thanks to built-in
support for responsive images.
Drupal 8 also provides support for responsive tables with table columns that can be
declared with high, medium, or low importance. On wide screens, all the columns
show, but as the screen size narrows, the less important columns start dropping
off so everything fits nicely. This API is also built into the Views module, so you can
configure your own responsive admin screens.
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7 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
The Responsive Bartik and Responsive Tables modules can make Drupal 7
behave similarly. Numerous responsive base themes for Drupal 7, including
Omega and Zen, help you build a responsive design for your website.
Mobile-friendly Toolbar
Drupal 8 sports a responsive administrative toolbar that automatically expands and
orients itself horizontally on wide screens and collapses down to icons and orients
itself vertically on smaller screens. Like all new front-end features in Drupal 8, this one
was designed with accessibility in mind. The toolbar allows screen-reader users to
easily navigate to various parts of a site.
If you’re interested in this feature for Drupal 7, check out the Mobile Friendly
Navigation Toolbar module.
Front-end Performance
One of the biggest factors that can make or break the mobile experience is the raw
performance of a website. As a result, a lot of work went into minimizing Drupal
8’s front-end footprint. Page loads were sped up by replacing jQuery with efficient,
targeted, native JavaScript in many cases and out-of-the-box Drupal 8 loads no
JavaScript files at all for anonymous visitors. Drupal 8’s caching is a big advance over
Drupal 7’s. It includes entity caching and powerful, granular cache tags which allow
for targeted cache clearing so pages stay fast longer. Drupal 8.1 also introduces
BigPipe page delivery as an experimental core module in Drupal 8.1. See the
Backend Developer Improvements chapter of this ebook for more on caching and
BigPipe’s effect on user experience thanks to faster perceived loading. Additionally,
lighter-weight, mobile-friendly alternatives replaced JavaScript-intensive features like
the Overlay module. Drupal 8 uses a simple “Back to site” link in the admin toolbar
while in an administrative context. See Escape Admin for a Drupal 7 equivalent.
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8 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
Multilingual++
The Multilingual Initiative (D8MI), led by Acquia’s own Gábor Hojtsy with the
participation of over 1,000 contributors, was a major development focus for
Drupal 8. Check out Gábor’s excellent Drupal 8 Multilingual Tidbits series if
you’re interested in all the details about D8MI.
Multilingual First
Drupal 8 is a CMS built from the ground up for multilingual use. You can perform
your entire site installation and setup in your language of choice. Right on the
installer page, it auto-detects your browser’s language and auto-selects that
language for installation in the drop-down for your convenience. When you install
Drupal in any language other than English (or later add a new language to your
site), Drupal 8 automatically downloads the latest interface translations from
localize.drupal.org in your language, too. This works for right-to-left languages,
such as Arabic and Hebrew, too. Drupal’s interface translations are dependent
on local communities for
accuracy and completeness,
so some translations may
be missing some strings.
On localize.drupal.org,
you can always contribute
those yourself and help
your language community
take advantage of Drupal.
Drupal 8 does away with
the previous Drupal-concept
of English as a “special”
language. If you select a
language other than English
on installation, the English
option will no longer show in
your site configuration unless explicitly turned on. Also, you can make English itself
“translatable” so that you can convert strings to something more tailored to your
users. For example, you can change “Log in / Log off” to “Sign in / Sign off.”
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9 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
Fewer Modules, Packing a Bigger Punch
Making a site multilingual in Drupal 8 requires nothing more than activating one or
more of just four modules, all shipped with Drupal 8 core. These four modules do
everything and more than the roughly 30 contributed modules and lots of tricky
configuration needed to make a Drupal 7 site multilingual.
Language provides Drupal 8’s underlying language support. It is the base
module and is required by the other multilingual modules.
Configuration Translation makes things like blocks, menus, views, and so
on, translatable.
Content Translation makes things such as nodes, taxonomy terms, and
comments translatable.
Interface Translation makes Drupal’s user interface itself translatable.
Why four modules and not just one, you ask? This granularity allows site builders to
choose whatever combination of features meet their site’s specific use case, without
forcing them to deal with the parts they don’t need. For example, single-language,
non-English sites are a valid use case, as are multilingual sites that may or may
not need their content translated (e.g. to keep user-generated content in its native
language), as are a plethora of combinations of interface languages and content
translations for site admins, content authors, and end users.
Language Selection Everywhere
Everything from system configuration settings to site components, such as blocks,
views, and menus, to individual field values on content are translatable. For content
entities (comments, nodes, users, taxonomy terms, and so on), you have even more
options, like configuring the visibility of the language selector, and whether newly
created content defaults to the site’s default language, the content author’s preferred
language, or some other value.
.
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10 THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO DRUPAL 8, REVISED AND UPDATED FOR DRUPAL 8.1
Streamlined Translation UIs
Drupal’s international community put a lot of effort into the user experience of Drupal
8’s multilingual functionality. You’ll see well-integrated and streamlined translation
interfaces throughout Drupal 8.
Transliteration Support
One really handy addition to Drupal 8 is the inclusion of the Transliteration module
in core. It automatically converts special characters like “ç” and “ü” to “c” and
“u” for friendlier, more human-readable machine names, file uploads, paths, and
search results.
...And More!
Here are some extras for site builders that are worth mentioning:
Several of the pages in core that are using Views allow for much easier
language-based customization, especially the admin views, where adding
language filters, a language column, and so on, are easy to put together.
The Drupal 8 core Content Translation module is well-integrated with Search
in core and the Search API can access language information as well.
The language selection system now supports one or more separate admin
languages, for easier management of multilingual sites by site admins who
might speak different languages.
Documents you may be interested
Documents you may be interested
