Drupal 8 Top Ten: Where Features Meet Functionality

Here at Appnovation, we live, love and breath all things Drupal, so it should come as no surprise that Drupal 8 is a big deal to us. With a cast list of over 3,000 contributors, Drupal 8 is a testament to the open source community, in which we have an active role, our dedication, and the ever-increasing popularity of open technologies in general. 

So, let's take a look at some of the main reasons why companies and corporations are increasingly chosing to either migrate or upgrade to Drupal 8...

1) Semantic Versioning (http://semver.org/) 

Drupal 8 now uses semantic versioning. This meant that, with major, minor, and patch releases, we will always know if there are bug fixes, new features, or API breaking changes. Simply superb, just like Drupal 8.

2) The Release Cycle

A new minor release is launched every 6 months. This means, in simple terms,  that we don't have to wait 5 years to get new features into core. Time, cost and all around efficiency. Drupal 8 delivers again.

3) “Getting off the island”

Reference: http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/off-the-island-2013)

Drupal now uses lots of code that wasn’t initially written, or invented for use with Drupal. In essence, it’s just good, standard code from the wider PHP community. This allows flexibility of development, never a bad thing. Drupal development continues to offer even more flexibility for users and developers alike.

Another added advantage, is the presence of ‘small’ updates, meaning that there are fewer things you need to test – i.e. going from D7→ D8 could be quite a leap, but with multiple, smaller updates throughout the year, it makes things much easier to manage (like cooking a lobster, slowly boiling the water, if you will).

4) Object Orientated

Much of the code is now object orientated, a lot of this being due to "getting off the island".

5) Views in Core

Views is the most used Drupal module, in fact, it’s a key building block to how Drupal functions, and stands head and shoulders above other CMS’s, so it makes a lot of sense that it has now been moved into core… so it's used ‘out of the box’.

6) Plugins, Events, & Services

These are all new concepts in Drupal 8, when writing modules it gives a whole new scope of how to build things.

7) Configuration Management

Drupal has always suffered from configuration living in the database alongside content, but Drupal 8 changes that…for the better. Configuration can now live in YAML files, and can also be managed along side code

8) Big Pipe

This is one of those features we could add in a minor release and was added in 8.1.0. Big Pipe is a concept from Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/bigpipe-pipelining-web-pages-for-high-performance/389414033919/) to build faster loading pages.

9) Time to Migrate

To help people move from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7, Drupal 8 adds basic migration.

It’s that simple, we’re not sure why you wouldn’t want to do it!

10) Twig Templates

Previously the front end was written in PHP frontenders don't like php. Twig is a lot better. http://twig.sensiolabs.org/

To read more about the Drupal 8 revolution, download our free D8 eBook: 

https://www.appnovation.com/resources/ebook/drupal-8-developed-deliver-drupal-domination