Drupal 8 features development started in March of 2011. Since the developer and application framework world has looked forward to the outcomes of every development, feature completion, clean-up, API completion, beta, and release candidate phase with baited breath. In November of 2015, Drupal 8.0.0 was released.
Drupal 8 is the latest release of the world’s largest and most widely used enterprise web Content Management System(CMS). It takes an already terrific content management framework to ever greater heights for users, administrators, and developers. It is Fast and Flexible. This time Drupal 8 taps into the concentrated innovation from its open source community and there are seriously focus on user-friendliness, content presentation, new ways to create data structures, build APIs, multilingual capabilities and Etc.
While Symfony 2 powers the Drupal 8 backend, a lighter and faster core offers tons more capabilities for modules and themes. Plus, the Drupal 8 migration and the onward curve is significantly reduced.
Drupal 8 Features
User friendly & Usable Backend:-
Drupal 8 was a big upgrade in usability experience and backend admin interface. You will find it much easier to use. Using Drupal admin without coding knowledge, users can create almost websites from small to medium size.
Theming:-
Drupal 8 is having more flexibility in theme modifications via its backend interface. It is very useful for both non-techenical users & developer. In any CMS if there is a complex function, non- technical users will not be able to implement it.
Drupal 7 uses PHPtemplate engine, which allows embedding PHP code into Html. This will not suite for users with no PHP coding skills. And we can see a great changes in Drupal 8. The newest version uses Twig, a standard providing an easy to use format for non-technical users.
If the users does’t have the coding knowledge Drupal backend will helps and able to manage a theme.
Multilanguage:-
Drupal 7 languages and translations are supported by a third party module. And we face a lot of difficulties working with it. There are lots of resources to manage – a long menu, languages divided into lots of clones, nodes increasing many times respectively.
A good thing is now Multilanguage has been in Drupal core. Users can now have an easier time working with content, and integrate a language they wants with less time.
In the admin interface has built-in translations. Users can also create pages with language based Views filtering and block visibility.
Views:-
Views is an integral part of most website projects, and a lot is pretty much impossible without it. Site designers have used use this contributed module to output Pages,galleries, maps, graphs, lists, posts, tables, menus, blocks, reports, and what-have-you. With this Drupal 8 feature, Views is part of and firmly integrated with the core.
The front page and several administration pages are now Views, and users will now be able to quickly create pages, blocks, admin sections, etc., and modify existing ones just as effortlessly.
Block is an Entity now:-
Drupal 7 was developed from the old version of PHP. Basically, Drupal up to the 7 version is not an OOP platform (object-oriented programming).Drupal 8 is based on a strong potential framework – Symfony. Drupal has made a great improvement in OOP. This is a big advantage for drupal professional coders, and also for companies with high standard of programing, unit test designing,maintenance and security.
Wysiwyg:-
Now Wysiwyg editor also included in Drupal core. And also in this version the checkbox to customize your toolbar has been replaced by a drag and drop interface. It’s really convenient.
Another change is the ability to edit the page content directly on the page it is displayed. Let’s say I want to edit my uploading image, I don’t have to be navigated to another page, tab, or overlay to configure it.
Web service:
In the past, websites were only for desktop and web services were only used for websites using a service from other systems to name a few, Google Map, Weather forecast, ….
Nowaday, with the advent of many different devices like mobiles and tablets, web services are most important than ever. Although there is responsive design to permits html shown responsive on different interfaces, there is a limitation of content surplus and overloaded resources for small devices. To improve performance for this kind of design, web services have been applied so that
In Drupal 7, web services are supported by a third party module – Services. And since it is such an important and prominent function, Services has been included in Drupal 8 core.