In December 2019, one of the last minor versions of Drupal 8 will be released before moving on to Drupal 9. Updates to version 8 have brought us many improvements in the management and formatting of our content (the Layout Builder module, in particular, comes to mind). These changes have altered the way site builders, administrators, editors, module developers, theme developers, and distribution developers work. Here is an overview of the new features introduced in version 8.8.
Media integration from the Drupal 8.8 WYSIWYG editor
It took a decade to finally see the arrival of one of the most popular features among Drupal users: better media management. The finishing touch is completed by adding media integration to the WYSIWYG editor. Drupal 8.8 will come with complete media management, allowing everyone (site builders and content authors) to integrate media into Drupal more easily.
Claro: The new and modern administration theme
Claro is a concise, clean, and responsive theme with an improved appearance and enhanced web accessibility, integrated as part of the User Interface and JavaScript Modernization Initiative. It is likely that the Claro theme will be added to Drupal 8.8.0 core as an experimental theme. The Drupal team is working on modernizing the administration and developing a new design system from scratch for the Drupal admin interface. A preview of the theme as well as changes made to create an effective design system can already be seen on the Drupal website.
Composer in the Drupal core initiative
This project provides a Composer plugin that lets you place files such as index.php, update.php, etc. from the drupal/core project into your preferred location in the web root. Only individual files can be scaffolded with this plugin.
The purpose of these files is to allow Composer to fully manage Drupal sites, while letting individual entry files be placed in arbitrary locations.
The goal of this operation is to allow the Composer module to produce a file layout that matches exactly the file layout of a Drupal 8.7.x (and earlier) distribution. Other file configurations will also be possible: for example, a project layout very similar to the current drupal-composer / drupal-project model will also be provided. When one of these projects is used, the user should be able to use Composer Required and update Composer on a Drupal site immediately after extracting the downloaded archive.
JSON: The API module in Drupal 8.8 should be significantly faster
This was made possible thanks to solving the following issues:
- Inclusion paths are resolved for each resource in a collection of resources;
- Resource normalization is neither leveraged nor shared;
- ResourceType value objects are calculated for every request;
- New cache layers were introduced to minimize costs by reusing computed entities.
The core modules "Content Moderation" and "Workspace" can be used together on the same site with Drupal 8.8.0!
Starting with Drupal 8.8.0, the Content Moderation and Workspace modules are no longer incompatible. They can now be installed and used together.
When both modules are installed, the local task for the latest revision provided by Content Moderation is no longer available, as Workspaces always displays the workspace-specific latest revision on the canonical entity view page (for example, /node/1). Additionally, when a moderation workflow is enabled for an entity type/set and there are entities in draft (undefined/unpublished) moderation states in a workspace, that workspace cannot be published until all draft entities have been published.
jQuery UI is being removed from Drupal core
The jQuery user interface allowed module developers to add rich effects to their code. Added to Drupal core in 2009, jQuery UI hasn’t been maintained since 2017 and is now listed as an emeritus project. jQuery UI is now deprecated in Drupal core and will be removed by Drupal 9. With the end of life for jQuery UI, it will not work with future versions of jQuery. Drupal core is transitioning to pure JavaScript solutions.
Path aliases (URLs) have been converted to revisionable entities
With Drupal 8.8.0, custom URL aliases are now provided by a new revisionable content entity type, "path_alias". The "path.alias_storage" service has been kept in place for backward compatibility, but its use is now deprecated. Check this link for recommended code changes to fully use the new system and prepare your code for Drupal 9 - https://www.drupal.org/node/3013865
Congratulations to all active members of the Drupal community who worked on Drupal 8.8 and paved the way to Drupal 9.
Further reading: