Drupal 8 brought a lot of new features along with it. Making it easier to create rich and beautiful pages. Among the new features included in Drupal 8.7, we saw the stable built-in drag-and-drop Layout Builder, updated Media Library interface, and more. These changes impact site builders, administrators, editors, module developers, themer's, and distribution developers. Drupal 8.8 will be released in December 2019 and will be the last minor release with features. 
Let’s look at what Drupal 8.8 has in store for us:

| Drupal's WYSIWYG editor will allow media embedding in Drupal 8.8!

It’s been a decade that the Drupal community has been waiting for the most wanted end-user feature - Better media handling! The addition of WYSIWYG integration completes the final milestone. Read more about it here - https://wimleers.com/blog/media-embedding-drupal-8.8. Drupal 8.8 will come along with complete media management, this enables the site builders and content authors to easily embed media in Drupal.

Check out the media embedding here - https://youtu.be/sTc2JJzs9iU

| New and modern administration theme Claro

Claro is a concise, clean, responsive theme with an improved look and enhanced web accessibility. Built on top of the Seven theme, it is now a contributed project. There is a probability that the Claro theme will be added to Drupal 8.8.0 core as an experimental theme.

| Composer in Drupal core initiative

To know more visit - https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/using-composer/using-drupals-composer-scaffold

| JSON:API module in Drupal 8.8 is expected to be significantly faster

This has been possible due to the resolution of the following issues:

• Include paths are resolved for every resource in a resource collection;
• Resource normalization is not leveraged and shared;
• ResourceType value objects are computed on every request.

New cache layers were introduced which minimized the cost by reusing computed entities.

| Content Moderation and Workspaces core modules can be  used on the same site with Drupal 8.8.0!

Starting with Drupal 8.8.0, the Content Moderation and Workspaces modules are no longer incompatible, so they can be installed and used together.

When both modules are installed, the Latest revision local task provided by Content Moderation is no longer available because Workspaces always shows the latest workspace-specific revision on the canonical entity view page (e.g. /node/1). Additionally, when a moderation workflow is enabled for an entity type/bundle and if there are entities in draft (non-default/unpublished) moderation states in a workspace, that workspace can not be published to Live until all the draft entities reach a publishable moderation state.

| jQuery UI is being phased out from the Drupal core

jQuery UI allowed module developers to add lavish effects to their code. Added to Drupal core in 2009, jQuery UI has been unmaintained since 2017 and is listed as an Emeritus project (projects where the maintainers have reached or are nearing end-of-life). jQuery UI is being deprecated from Drupal core and will be removed by Drupal 9. With jQuery UI’s end of life, it will not work with future jQuery versions. Drupal core is in the process of switching to pure JavaScript solutions. Modules and/or themes depending on jQuery UI would require it as a dependency and manage their libraries.

| Configuration Management improvements in Drupal 8.8

• Sync directory is defined in $settings['config_sync_directory'] and not $config_directories.

The ability to support multiple configuration directions in the $config_directories is now deprecated. If you have custom or contributed code that relies on this ability you need to move your setting either to $settings or another to storage. To know more about this visit - https://www.drupal.org/node/3018145

• Event is dispatched before configuration import and export to transform of the configuration - https://www.drupal.org/node/3066005

These events allow modules to interact with the configuration deployment workflow. This was previously only possible with the contrib Config Filter module.

• Modules can be excluded from the configuration synchronization -https://www.drupal.org/node/3079028

A few modules help in developing a Drupal site but are not intended to be deployed to production. Until Drupal 8.8.0 developers had to rely on contrib solutions such as Config Split to separate the development configuration. But sometimes it is not necessary to share the development configuration and instead it is more important to guarantee that development modules can not be included in the configuration export. This is precisely what the lesser-known Config Exclude contrib module did and its functionality is now available for everyone.

| Path aliases have been converted to revisionable entities

With Drupal 8.8.0, custom URL aliases are now provided by a new path_alias revisionable content entity type. The path.alias_storage service has been kept in place for backward compatibility, and its hook has been deprecated. Check out this link for code changes recommended to fully utilize the new system and prepare your code for Drupal 9 - https://www.drupal.org/node/3013865 

Conclusion

With all of these features, the upcoming and previous versions of Drupal 8 are very lucrative for content editors. Kudos to all the Drupalers who have worked on Drupal 8.8 and chalking out the path to Drupal 9. 

Reference - Drupal.org