When it comes to CMS or content management system, the Drupal 8 is taking it to greater heights for the administrators, users as well as developers especially in case of CMS development. There is a major focus in the user-friendliness, but the presentation of the content, building of APIs, new methods to create data structures, delivery of mobile accessibility and multilingual capabilities are some of the inherent addition to Drupal 8. The Drupal 8 backend is powered by Symphony 2 which is a faster and lighter core which provides a lot of capabilities for themes as well as a module. Drupal 8 migration, as well as an onward curve, has reduced significantly. These changes are the main reasons for considering the switch to Drupal 8. Let’s look at the features of Drupal 8 which have appeared.
Features of Drupal 8
1. Latest Theme Engine
Drupal 8 consists of the entirely new theming engine which is called Twig that is based on PHP. It is fast, flexible and secure. It is quite easier to develop aesthetically beautiful as well as more functional websites using Twig as the templates are essentially written in a particular syntax which is less complex than those of the PHP templates. CMS website development is a breeze with this theme engine.
2. Mobile First
It is mobile first when it comes to the approach. All of the inbuilt themes which come with the Drupal 8 are essentially responsive. Also, the admin theme is there which adapts to various screen sizes along with a “Back to Site” button that takes to the front page. The tables can fit into any type of screen size without any hassle, and the latest admin toolbar works seamlessly on mobile devices.
3. Leveraging the power of HTML5
HTML5 has become the standard when it is about writing the web markup. The same is also available now in Drupal 8, which gives the access to input fields such as email, data, phone etc. along with more functionalities as well as compatibility with different mobile devices.
4. Multilingual Feature
It boasts of the extensive multilingual features which are essentially out of the box. The entire admin interface has in-built translations. You can easily create pages with block visibility and the language-based View filtering. The translation updates from the entire community are facilitated automatically. You need drupal experts for hire that can leverage the advantage of this features.
5. Configuration Management
Drupal 8 comes with configuration management which his built into the entire file-system level such that carrying over the different configuration elements like views, content type, fields etc. from the local development to the server is seamless. You can easily utilize the version-control system in order to keep track of different configuration changes. The configuration data is also stored in files which is separate from the databases of the site.
6. Authoring Simplified
The new Drupal 8 features that it brings is that it powers the hands of WYSIWYG editor, Content Editor and CKEditor which is bundled with the core. The essential improvements is the in-place editing capability which it will afford the users. , as well as content creators or the editors, can now edit text or any type of page without any requirement to switch to the entire full edit form. Drafts are now much easy to create, and the web security is better implemented due to it.
7. Easier and Quicker Edits
Quick Edit is essentially a backport of the in-place editing for Fields of Drupal 8. So in case you are logged into the Drupal content which is in front of you, you can easily edit the text directly for different quick fixes as well as additions from the present front-end.
8. Views as Part of Core
Views are of higher importance in Drupal module hierarchy, and it is an essential part of most of the website projects which are pretty impossible without it. The designers of the site have used this hitherto-contributed module in order to output maps, galleries, lists, graphs, tables, posts, menus, reports etc. With this particular feature, the Views is part as well as firmly integrated with the entire core. The front page, as well as different administration pages, are now actually Views, and the users will be able to quickly create blocks, pages, admin sections and also modify the existing ones effortlessly.
9. Accessibility Support
Drupal 8 comes with great support for industry standard technologies of accessibility like ARIA Live Announcements API, WAI-ARIA, TabManager which are significant improvements that provide complete control for rich web applications. Different additional improvements like better font sizes, jQuery UI autocomplete tweaked colour contrasts, as well as modal dialogs, present new opportunities which make the use of Drupal 8 quite easy.
10. In-built Web Services
It now makes it quite possible to utilize itself as a particular data source and the output content as XML or JSON. You can also post data back to the Drupal 8 from the given front end.
Conclusion
Drupal 8 comes with a large variety of features which revolutionizes the content management systems universe. It has marked its territory as potent CMS which provides unprecedented potential. The above-mentioned features prove the improvements and opportunities that Drupal 8 offers.
