Drupal 8: The Next Big Thing for the Dev Community

So, you have been a loyal Drupal user for a long time. From version 1 to version 7, you have worked on them all. But now it’s time for Drupal 8. Yes! The release of Drupal 8 is underway and this brand new offering form the Drupal community is laden with innumerable enticing features. Whether it’s the core, the authoring functionality or the theming feature, every bit and part of the CMS has got a facelift. So what is it that you can really expect from Drupal 8? Well, quite a lot. With its feature freeze already complete and the code freeze close ahead, the 8th version of the CMS is likely to be a tech butterfly with several hues, each unique in itself. Let’s take a look at some of these hues, and understand what big changes this upgraded CMS has in store for us.

1. Core: This is probably the most noteworthy change in Drupal 8. The CMS is shifting its core to the Symfony 2 framework. With this big switch there are several strategic goals that are likely to be accomplished. Firstly, the burden of writing basic functionality will be taken off the developers’ shoulders as Symfony will take good care of that. They can concentrate on solving practical problems instead. Secondly, Symfony happens to be an object-oriented feature-rich framework which is exactly what Drupal has been aspiring to become.

2. Authoring: With the 8th version in pipeline, the authoring experience rendered by the CMS will enhance. Of late, content authoring has been the most prominent weakness of the Drupal CMS and to rectify it, the community launched the Spark project. Spark is a high-end tool that takes the authoring experience to another tangent by using AJAX for inline editing of pages. The admin interface for content management has also got a facelift. The community is also putting in effort to add media support into the core.

3. Mobile: Drupal 8 will be mobile-ready. The upgraded platform will be responsive and capable of working with CSS3 and HTML 5. While Drupal 7 had only a few modules that addressed the mobile compatibility issue, the users will witness an active mobile initiative with the 8th edition of the CMS. The team behind the CMS is working rigorously to render better presentation and functionality for the mobile platforms.

4. Theming: Drupal will have a new theming engine- the twig framework. The community has bid adieu to PHPTemplate. With Twig, the theming experience will become more safe, fast and small and developers will be able optimize theming layer in logic. This will enhance the theming architecture of the CMS and make it more orderly.

5. Internationalization: Drupal 8 will go international! The upgraded version of the CMS will offer support for multiple languages. With the release of Drupal 8 multilingual initiative, developers are hoping that the platform will overcome the limitations that were encountered in the previous versions.

Drupal 8 is ready to set its feet in the web arena. If you are planning to make the big switch to Drupal 8, it is best to consult an established Drupal development company that has expertise in rendering Drupal development services. This will give you a fair idea about the potential of the upgraded version and will help you in deciding whether this new version is meant for your business or not.