Drupal 8: what’s new? what will change?

• Published:May 23rd, 2013
• Category:Drupal 8

Everything! Really!

Drupal 8 changes for developers

Everything will change and certainly for developers

• The code will be more object oriented,
• there will be a Symfony-like approach of theming (say goodbye to the _theme() hooks),
• migrating from local to staging or a live-environment will be easier, as you will be able to save certain local settings in the code,
• there’s the development project WSCCI (pronounced “Whiskey”) that will give devs the opportunity to write output for json, for apps, or for anything else besides html,
• the multi-language-approach will be more logical and out of the box (Europe sighs).

In short… you probably won’t be able to reuse a single line of code from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8.

If you want to learn Drupal from scratch, you might want to wait till the release of 8 before you start to study.

Changes for users

For the users the changes are less dramatic, but there’s one big new feature:

• In-place-editing, found in almost every commercial CMS will finally come to Drupal. This means that when you want to edit a text on a page, you don’t have to press the edit button, find the right field and save, but instead you’ll be able to change text within the normal website layout.

Still a lot of work

But… there’s still a lot of work. Drupal 8 is far from ready. The official release is planned towards the end of 2013, but the date march 2014 is probably more realistic. The in-place-editing for example is currently not working for the title-field, because the title is technically not a field. WSCCI is also far from ready.

Things are even so not-ready that some new features might be cut.

Download/contribute

Those who want to contribute or want a sneak preview, can install D8 through GIT. Though, it’s not stable, not even in beta, so don’t use it in a live-environment.

$ git clone --branch 8.x http://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git