Why Should You Upgrade To Drupal 8?

The new release of world’s leading open source content management platform Drupal is packed with over 200 new features and improvements. With these prominent features, Drupal 8 will set new standards in offering plethora of ways to customize your website content, display data on mobile devices, and build API’s.

Thanks to the modern OOP (Object Oriented Programming) approach, which gives you easier migration process from an earlier version, in-place content editing tools, leaner and meaner core and a broad array of themes.

Stay Informed: How Drupal 8 Has Revolutionized CMS?

• Table of Contents

  Drupal 8 New Features:

Here are new features that are added in Drupal 8:

source: zyxware technologies

• Feature Difference Between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 (Infographic):

Let’s find out features difference between Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 with the help of Infographics:

• Feature Comparison of Drupal 7 and Drupal 8:

	Drupal 7	Drupal 8
Look	It is less pretty than D8 and no warning appears about time zone setting	It starts with a warning about time zone setting, which goes away after refreshing. It is much responsive and you can easily see expanded menu in a smaller screen.
Behind-the-scene glance		D8 is cleaner than D7, as it hides the core folder in a folder named “Core”.
Features Comparison	Rapid and Agile Web 2.0 Development Thousands of free Modules (16,000+) huge community of theme designers massively scalable 100% free Known for its enhanced security Powerful modules, clean code and modern web publishing Integrating payment gateways Powerful content creation and collaboration Easily connect with the web’s leading 3rd party services	In addition to Drupal 7 features, Drupal 8 has following new features: Mobile friendly themes Views is added as one of the core module of Drupal 8 Inline editor edits content of a page without going to the edit page Symfony framework is used in Drupal 8 which makes the code easy to maintain, scale, and reuse. CkEditor for editing web pages New picture module to automatically resize the image With multilingual capabilities, you can translate anything in system REST (Representational State Transfer) for reading, creating, deleting and updating resources.

• Drupal 7 Vs Drupal 8

Here are new features of Drupal 8 that you need to know:

More Secure and Eye-catchy Theme Engine   

The new Drupal has a new PHP based theming engine called Twig, which is flexible, secure and quite fast. Now, you can easily create a more captivating and functional Drupal website using Twig theme engine. The templates of Twig are written in a syntax which is not as complex as phptemplate while being more secure.

Mobile Friendly Design

Drupal 8 is designed with mobile-first approach. All its themes are responsive and adapts to different sizes of screen. Its themes also have “Back To Site” button that helps to back to the last webpage you were at. Now, tables of any kind fit into different screen sizes without any hassle, and the new admin toolbar works efficiently on mobile devices.

Drupal 8 also allows you to select different styles for individual pictures. These plethora of styles will be used for different sizes of the device.

Equipped with HTML5 power

When it comes to web mark-up writing, HTML5 is considered as the de-facto standard. Now, it is available natively in Drupal 8, which gives you access to input fields like date, phone, email, etc. It also enhances the compatibility and functionality with hand-held devices like smart-phones and tablets.

Multilingual Ready

The latest version of Drupal boasts of extensive multilingual features and built-in translation features in the admin panel. In addition, you can create web pages with block visibility and language based views filtering. You can automatically get translation updates from the community. 

Editing Makes Simple    

With CKEditor (replacement for default WYSIWYG), Drupal’s latest version brings unexampled power into the hands of content editors. Now, content editors/creators can edit text in any page without switching to the full edit form and drafts can be created easily.

New Fields

The Drupal 8 comprises five completely new field types. The new field types are:

• Email
• Date
• Link
• Reference
• Telephone

In addition, D8 has some minor changes too:

• Now, comments is available as a field (not in a setting)
• English (used for the field name) is more straightforward. For example, now the “Integer” is simply “Number”.

7. Tour Module

The explanatory text in Drupal 7 was hidden away under the “Help” link. Drupal 8 has separate “Tour” module. By clicking this link, you can see pop-ups that explain the working of Drupal.

According to Industrial Standards

Drupal 8 is built with the latest standards of PHP like namespaces, PSR-0 and traits. It also uses Composer, external libraries, Guzzle, PHPUnit, Zend Feed Component, Assetic to name a few. The latest Object-Oriented Code is predominant and is powered by Symfony 2. 

Drupal 8 Facts & Stats 

Conclusion:

These new features of Drupal 8 will likely be great steps forward for the expansion of Drupal as a major CMS. With these features, no doubt, Drupal 8 will provide a better experience for clients as well as developers. These changes definitely make Drupal websites easier to build, support, use and migrate. The release date for Drupal 8 is 19th November 2015.

A business looking for Drupal 8 up-gradation services must hire a digital agency like PixelCrayons.