Drupal 8 News: What Web Developers Should Be Prepared For
Seems like the 8th version of Drupal should bring more excellent opportunities for web developers. The project includes six major initiatives, which actually define the character of incoming release. We can see that Drupal Team strongly follows the tendencies in modern technology process: for example, they are eager to grant the product with perfect mobile support, reacting on the smartphone boom. In general, Drupal 8 is claimed to become a remarkable web development framework of modern time.
According to the core initiatives (the first development cycle) status, scale shows 50%+ progress for every point, except the Layouts division. So we can expect the new version to be put into use soon. By the way, in case you want to speed up the process the Drupal Team is always glad to accept new developers and testers. Maybe you want to try? Below I will review every initiative in detail and the latest news regarding them.
Front-end
Mobile
A desire to make Drupal a mobile platform of full value is more than reasonable considering the current situation with handheld devices. The Drupal Mobile community states they have already made many changes and additions in user interface of the administrative panel. The other side of advance for mobile web consists in improving the design of the main themes: Stark, Bartik, and Seven are supposed to be responsive.
Multilingual
Globalization dictates its own laws, which have the bottom line: everything should be internationalized. It implies not only the idea every educated person should know such worldwide such lingua franca as English well, but also the development of linguistic pluralism in production. Drupal 8 will be completely translated into a wide range of languages available – as of November 2021, there are 100+ languages including default English and right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
Design
New trends and concepts in web design need fresh approach. The Drupal Team elaborates actual themes. Also guys from Design initiative are concentrated on a new UX level to make usage as comfortable as possible. The PHP template is going to be replaced by Twig framework Theming engine, which would greatly optimize the functionality and the work with PHP code.
HTML 5
The internet goes to the point of total standardization. There is no place for discussion if it’s good or bad, but it’s obvious companies, striving for success on the web, should take this process into consideration. Thus, the Drupal team decided to provide the new version with full HTML5 integration. The elements of HTML 5 native markup will be built in the Drupal 8 core.
Back-end
Configuration Management
This is one of the most massive initiatives due to the wide range of issues it is destined to resolve. The participants mainly focused on improvement of interaction with module stores, server environments and API.
Web Services
The bottom line is improving the context system. This activity is so important to achieve a goal of transformation Drupal from simple CMS into REST with CMS on the top of it. This is really useful for easing the operations concerning data: it can be cached and it would require context definition; sharing feeds between Drupal websites would be also simplified.
The information in this summary is quite concise, however it gives a clear understanding what we can expect from Drupal 8. Anyway, if you deem something is unfairly ignored in this article, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
