What’s new in Drupal 8.7.0?
This release introduces powerful features that will help us all take Drupal to a whole new level. The new stable JSON:API core module as well as the intuitive and accessible stable Layout Builder are game-changing.
Layout Builder is stable
The Layout Builder module was originally introduced as an experimental module in Drupal 8.5.0. As of Drupal 8.7.0, Layout Builder is now stable and ready for production use! It provides a powerful, accessible, mobile-friendly page building tool that is fully compatible with revisions, workflows, and in-context previews.
The Layout Builder enables site builders to rapidly create layout templates for content that speed up the development process. It also permits content authors to easily customize individual pages with unique layouts.
The interface allows drag-and-drop management of your content blocks. It additionally supports keyboard controls and toggling the content preview on and off to give the content editor complete control of their experience while building their layouts.
The result of all these features is a state-of-the art content management solution that streamlines mass-production while also supporting unique creation. 123 individuals and 68 organizations contributed to this feature. More than 40 of the individual contributors volunteered some or all of their time.
Check out this demonstration based on the core Umami demo:
The team is working on implementing translation support for layouts in a future release.
New stable JSON:API support
JSON:API support is now included as a stable core feature. The JSON:API specification is an easy and fast way to build decoupled applications. Drupal core's JSON:API module is feature-complete and easy to use with robust out-of-the-box support and simple setup. JSON:API makes it simpler than ever to build ambitious projects. 147 contributors and 76 organizations contributed to this new feature. Among the individual contributors, more than 50 volunteered some or all of their time.
For example, by simply navigating to a URL like https://example.com/jsonapi/node/article, you can get a list of available articles on your site, and filter further from there, to display your Drupal content in decoupled websites, mobile applications, and so on.
Improvements in experimental Media Library
The experimental Media Library has numerous significant improvements in this release. The Media Library is built on top of the stable Media module, which allows reuse of images, documents, and even embedded remote media like YouTube videos. Items in the Media Library can be managed with drag-and-drop. This release improves the design and accessibility of the user interface, allows inline media creation in the library, and provides more flexible grid and table views. 310 contributors and 122 organizations contributed to this new feature. More than 100 individuals volunteered some or all of their time!
Check out this demonstration based the core Umami demo with Media Library enabled:
There are various tasks left to make Media Library stable in a future release, including WYSIWYG integration.
Revisionable menus and taxonomy terms
Custom menu links and taxonomy terms are now revisionable, which allows them to be used in editorial workflows (similarly to nodes, media, and custom blocks). The Entity system now also provides a new Update API to support conversion of further entity types. It supports converting the schema of any content entity type between non-revisionable or non-translatable and revisionable or translatable, which also works when there is pre-existing data for the entity type whose schema is being changed. All these changes improve core support for the Workspaces module.
New features in the Umami demo profile
The Umami food magazine demo is now more accessible and demonstrates more features out of the box, including a new welcome tour, Layout Builder integration for recipes, and multilingual features. The profile now includes a curated set of Spanish translations, and more languages are in the works. 187 contributors and 84 organizations have contributed to Umami, with more than 60 individuals volunteering some or all of their time.
Umami empowers first-time users to spin up a Drupal project in no time so that they can use to evaluate Drupal and learn about its major components.
On the way to Drupal 9
Drupal 8.7.0 includes optional support for Twig 2 (for sites that can patch their Composer configuration). Optional support for Symfony 4 also received a lot of contributions and should be complete in 8.8. This is important work, because Drupal 9 is planned for June 3, 2020 and will update various dependencies, primarily Symfony. Testing Drupal with updated third-party dependencies will help us get better feedback on our compatibility with these dependencies and any difficulties sites encounter when upgrading.
What does this mean for me?
Drupal 8 site owners
Update to 8.7.0 to continue receiving bug fixes. The next bugfix release (8.7.1) is scheduled for June 5, 2019. (See the release schedule overview for more information.) As of this release, sites on Drupal 8.5 will no longer receive security coverage. (Drupal 8.6 will continue receiving security fixes until December 4, 2019.)
Note that new Drupal 8.7.0 installs now require at least PHP 7.0.8. Existing sites still work on at least PHP 5.5.9 for now, but will display a warning. Drupal security updates will begin requiring PHP 7 as early as Drupal 8.8.0 (December 2019), so all users are advised to update to at least PHP 7.0.8 now.
Updating your site from 8.6.15 to 8.7.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.6.14 to 8.6.15. Drupal 8.7.0 also has updates to several dependencies. Modules, themes, and translations may need updates for these and other changes in this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site. Read the 8.7.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your site.
Drupal 6 and 7 site owners
Drupal 7 is fully supported by the community until November 2021, and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout this time. From November 2021 until at least November 2024, the Drupal 7 Vendor Extended Support program will be offered by vendors.
Drupal 6 is no longer supported.
You can now use the stable migration path for monolingual Drupal 6 and 7 sites with the built-in upgrade user interface. For multilingual sites, there is experimental support; please keep testing and reporting any issues you may find.
Translation, module, and theme contributors
Minor releases like Drupal 8.7.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features.
Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 8.6.x and earlier will be compatible with 8.7.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes. Read the 8.7.0 release notes for a full list of changes that may affect your modules and themes.
This release has advanced the Drupal project significantly and represents the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and contributors from various organizations, as well as testers from the Minor release beta testing program. Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 8.7!