At this year’s DrupalCon, held earlier in April in Seattle, Drupal founder Dries Buytaert gave attendees a preview of the newest version of Drupal: 8.7. Now, the wait is over. Drupal 8.7 is launching today, May 1, adding a new suite of features and fixes that will improve the Drupal experience for everyone with an up-to-date platform.
In his keynote, or “Driesnote,” Dries laid out what made this new release so special. Speaking to the Drupal community at large, Dries shared that the Drupal team had several core objectives when developing Drupal 8.7:
- Make Drupal easy for content creators and site builders
- Make Drupal easy to evaluate and adopt
- Keep Drupal impactful and relevant
- Reduce total cost of ownership for developers and site owners
Each one of these goals represented a major challenge, but the newest version has delivered a variety of updates that each make Drupal a more robust platform.
Empowering content creators
One of the biggest features in Drupal 8.7 is the newly stable Layout Builder tool. The product of the efforts of 123 contributors and 68 supporting organizations, Layout Builder makes designing pages more user-friendly. As the name implies, the Layout Builder tool enables editors to manually adjust the design and format of a page. With this tool, editors can make changes to the layout without having to involve developers every time. Dries displayed a demo of the Layout Builder tool during the Driesnote, which can be found below.
Along with layout builder, the other major content improvement ushered in by Drupal 8.7 is the updated media module. As of this most recent update, reusable media, images, video and drag-and-drop features for the media module are all stable, with the media library currently in the “experimental” state. Combined with layout builder, these updates make Drupal 8.7 a great update for content editors.
Out of the box functionality
While Drupal 8.7 certainly makes life easier for editors, it doesn’t stop there. New out of the box features make Drupal easier to adopt than ever. New to the Umami theme in Drupal 8.7 are demo articles containing Spanish translations by default and improved accessibility throughout the theme, with new labels and focus styles highlighted. This helps to show Drupal 8.7’s capabilities in terms of both multilingual and accessibility right out of the box. Additionally, the “Welcome tour” feature makes it easier for agencies to demo the platform. All of these features are included with the new update automatically.
Staying relevant
To remain a driving force in the market, Drupal needs to keep up with the times. The biggest breath of fresh air Drupal 8.7 brings to the platform is the addition of the JSON:API to the core. This development extends Drupal’s “API-first” philosophy, enabling decoupled and headless solutions. If this type of buildout is what your organization needs, the Drupal 8.7 update makes developing these popular solutions much easier.
Lowered costs
Because Drupal 9 (D9) is built on the same codebase as D8, the eventual upgrade process will be much easier than a conventional website upgrade. Previously, upgrades were major undertakings that required a lot of development effort. Now, as long as a site is not using any deprecated code, upgrading to D9 will be very straightforward. A tool called drupal-check is already available to check for deprecated code, so it’s already possible to start getting a site ready for D9. In the meantime, Drupal 8.7 offers a number of new features and enhancements and is another step toward the eventual D9 upgrade..
There’s certainly plenty to enjoy with this new release, but the updates don’t stop here. With Drupal on a six-month release cycle, there will be a new version of Drupal on November 1. Drupal 8.8 promises an updated WYSIWYG editor along with a potentially updated Admin UI, an ongoing project for the Drupal team. Beyond that is D9, the latest edition of the platform.
Duo can help you make the most out of Drupal 8.7’s newest features while also planning your roadmap for upgrading. If you’re ready to see what the future of Drupal has to offer, reach out to us today.
