The one thing that the IT industry has taught everyone is if you stop, then you will lose. As simple as it is, if you are not upgrading yourself with the latest versions, then gradually you will see that your existing features and functions are outdated and hard to switch after a given period of time. With the recent release of Drupal’s latest version 8, most of the people are unaware about the features that are introduced with it. Though Drupal took three to five years for releasing its Beta version, it has much more offer with its Version 8 release. There are more than 500 changes to the core components of the Drupal in version 8, which is twice the number of changes in Version 7.
Some of the popular changes which are frozen are,
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- Mobile Friendliness
With the increasing number of mobile devices, the 1600 contributors team of Drupal has not only enhanced the themes to be mobile friendly but also improved the admin pages to be easily accessed on mobile. The admin toolbar featured is lightweight, mobile first and the tables shrink as required.
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- Universal Unique Ids (UUIDS)
In the latest version, Drupal team has focused more on adding uniformity of the data structures. The previous versions of Drupal had IDs for nodequexe, taxonomy terms, etc. Using the UUIDS for different types of content, the process of development becomes more streamlined and particular during the migration.
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- Inline Editing
Mostly content managers will have a sigh of relief with the latest version as it allows you to edit the content by just clicking on the pencil icon near the required content option. You are free from looking for needed content types or investigating the admin panel.
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- Multilingual Capabilities
The Drupal 8 version has been enhanced with multi-lingual capabilities by which you can expand your reach to global audience in their native language. You can easily translate the details in the system with built-in user interfaces and build pages with language filtering and block visibility. You can also get regular updates of the translation software from the Drupal community.
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- Configuration Management
The latest version offers you the facility and flexibility to take a snapshot of the Drupal development at a given point of time. It becomes an invaluable tool which helps in streamlining several processes like development process, deployment process and the migration process. Whenever any setting changes occur, it is automatically saved in the config file and the DB.
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- OOP Support
Apart from the features in Drupal 8, you can find new features in the next version, development for which has already begun. You will find object oriented programming (OOP) components support in Drupal 9 version.
In-Built Webservices
Using the latest version of Drupal as data source, you can build a variety of mobile apps. As Drupal 8 implements high tech HAL applications, you can expose the content as JSON or XML, and authenticate clients with HTTP or expose views-generated lists as services.
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- HTML5 Markup
The industry standard feature of HTML5 has also been added in the Drupal version 8 so that you can make dynamic website which is compatible for all screen sizes. You can find appropriate native tools on mobile for phone, date and e-mail fields.
There are several features in the Drupal 8 version while we have covered some of the important and popular ones, as it is not practical cover the entire list of 500 changes in single post. But, if you have any query related to Drupal development then you can let our Drupal Development team from NCode Technologies, Inc. get in touch with you. With more than a decade years of experience, NCode Technologies, Inc. has been catering to several clients from all over the globe.