Over the last few months, we've been covering the Drupal community's progress towards releasing Drupal 8.
Our last update was a month ago. I explained that the core file structure had changed, plus there were over 15 new modules including Views.
Since that update, the first major deadline has arrived. Feature freeze was in the beginning of December, although that deadline slipped a little, and we can still expect new features until February.
However, lots of great new features have arrived in the last month, and so let's take another look at the state of Drupal 8.
Drupal 8 has a new toolbar that's considerably shorter and more concise than anything we've seen in previous versions. The toolbar also includes icons for the first time.
The main navigation elements that you'd expect to see in Drupal are now under the "Menu" tab. The terminology is almost the same as Drupal 7, except that "Modules" has been replaced by "Extend".
This toolbar is mobile-ready:
On mobile screens, the sub-links move to the sidebar. This sidebar menu is available as an option for desktop users too.
One of the most exciting new features in Drupal 8 is inline editing. Whenever you're on any content page, click "Edit" in the toolbar.
You'll see that your content elements are highlighted:
Click any element and you'll see it pop out of the page:
You'll be able to edit the save the content directly from your current page:
Currently this editing is available only for content fields. I presume it may later be extended to allow the editing of content titles and other elements.
Presumably to help make Drupal more friendly for entry-level site builder, the Contact form module is now enabled by default:
You can add fields to the form so it will be quick and easy to expand the contact forms:
One thing I haven't heard mention, but that struck me in Drupal 8, was that a lot of interfaces have been cleaned up.
In Drupal 7, screens like this contain at least 4 links for each content type.
The same was true with the menu screens. Some of the links are hidden under the dropdowns on the right, but many have been removed entirelyl
The Modules / Extend screen has also been greatly simplified.
All in all, it looks like there's been a real effort to reduce the information overload on many of these screens.
Three new language translation modules have been added to Drupal 8:
Inside Configuration > Languages, you can quickly click and Add languages.
At the moment, because Drupal 8 is still in development, the admin interface still needs to be translated manually, hence the 0/300 score in the image below.
The Drupal core will now automatically attempt to detect the language preferences of both visitors and administrators:
Every time you want to translate something, you need to give explicit permission. For example, if you want to translate a content type, you first need to edit that content type and enable translations.
Then you need to enable translations for each field within that content type:
Once that's done, you'll see a Translations tab on content items:
Translations also appear in the contextual links:
Once you click either of these links you'll get a translation screen like the one below:
The translation screen for each language looks exactly like the screen for your default language.
Drupal Developer having 9+ year experience, implementation and having strong knowledge of technical specifications, workflow development. Ability to perform effectively and efficiently in team and individually. Always enthusiastic and interseted to study new technologies
It's been a while since I've sat down and tried to write a module from scratch in Drupal 8. I've dabbled here and there in the various already existing modules but there's always something interesting about just trying to write that simple
Have you ever tried to make major changes to a Drupal site using update.php and a few update_N hooks
With all the software we teach, some tasks almost always confuse beginners.
