Drupal 8 Excitement

Hurray, Hurray for Drupal 8! Yes, it’s official, Drupal 8 is here and the team at Bartlett Interactive is pretty excited. So what is the big deal? Let us tell you:

1. The Long Process
   The development of Drupal 8 took over 4 years of development to create. In this time there have been some major changes to Drupal 7, including some sweet new programming concepts and a powerful new suite of tools. This includes 200 new features and improvements. It appears that in the future, Drupal will be releasing intermittent features rather than one large single release as in the past.

2. Drupal 8 Theming
   Drupal 8 makes the theme layer easier to understand, including changes to make Drupal responsive and mobile friendly (great for SEO). Our friends over at Drupalizeme have uploaded a helpful video about the way that themes are built in Drupal 8, check it out: “Drupal 8: Theming”.

3. User Content Entry and Filtering Improvements
   Users with access to the WYSIWYG editor in past Drupal versions were usually granted access to the full html text format, thus providing power to those who may not yet be ready. According to the Acquia Learning Center, “To encourage the best practice of only allowing the use of the filtered HTML format, the Drupal 8 WYSIWYG editor configuration is integrated with the corresponding text filter.”

4. Getting Started
   You can start considering projects for Drupal 8 anytime, though you may want to wait a safe amount of time for any bugs to work themselves out. There are some Drupal 8 early adopters and thousands of Drupal 8 installations already. With the official release of Drupal 8, here are a few lessons learned from an early Drupal 8 Project (thanks Acquia!)

Dries Buytaert, the software and founder of Drupal, said “I'm proud to see that we've responded to these market forces with Drupal 8, and delivered a robust, solid product that can be used to build next-generation websites, web applications and digital experiences.”

Watch Dries Buytaert announce Drupal 8

On another note, for any SEO fans, SEO Yoast recently announced the launch of Yoast SEO for Drupal. Yes, our favorite SEO plugin for Wordpress is now officially available for Drupal. Thought we’d share the news!

Interested in learning more about Drupal 8? Contact your local Drupal 8 experts and let us help you get started!