12 REASONS TO GET ONBOARD: DRUPAL 8

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2 TABLE OF CONTENTS WELCOME TO A NEW DRUPAL... 3 MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS... 4 Resoponsive Web Design...5 UI patterns morph and content adapts while preserving UX. Web Services...6 Use Drupal as your data source. Authoring...7 Anytime, any place. Even when you re on the go. HTML...8 Not knowing HTML will NOT slow you down in Drupal 8. Mobile Support...9 Now you can work where you want, the way you want. User Support...10 Newcomers find the guided tour one of most useful features. IT MANAGEMENT Configuration Management...12 Configuration management at the file-system level. Performance...13 The Big Pipe component and greatly improved site load time. Multilingual Support...14 Baked in from the ground up. Object Oriented Approach...15 Drupal 8 and the Symfony framework. Backend Capabilities...16 Greater flexibility in customizing themes. Industry Standards...17 Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications. 2

3 WELCOME TO A NEW DRUPAL Drupal is primarily a platform for web content management, although it s also used for business collaboration and knowledge management in some environments. It has an open source and is distributed under the GNU General Public License, which means that it can be modified, distributed, and used for free. Drupal provides the back-end framework for more than 2 percent of the world s websites, including personal, corporate and government sites. The Drupal community has over one million members as of January 2017, including over 100,000 active contributors. Drupal s standard release, or core, contains all the features required by a CMS. Some of the most important of these features include the registration and maintenance of user accounts, system administration, menu management, page layouts and RSS feeds. Drupal s core installation can provide a range of webrelated services, including a simple website, blog, forum and other forms of user-generated content. Drupal 7 was released on January 5, 2011 and maintenance updates of this version are still released at regular intervals. Drupal 8 began its feature completion on December 1, 2012, and its first release candidate was announced on October 7, Drupal 8 is a major upgrade that introduces many new features and other improvements for both marketing and Information Technology (IT) people. The most noticeable improvements include a revamped user interface with a what-you-see-is-whatyou-get (WYSIWYG) editor, more support for mobile devices and better support for multiple languages. New features in Drupal 8 include modules such as Date, Entity Reference and Views. Drupal 8 was also built using an object-oriented approach (OOP) based on many Symfony components. 3

4 MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS Marketing and communications professionals typically use Drupal as a CMS to create, manage, and distribute website content. The most significant changes in Drupal 8 for these groups include the following: RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN WEB SERVICES AUTHORING HTML MOBILE SUPPORT VIEWS USER SUPPORT 4

5 RESPONSIVE WEB DESIGN The purpose of responsive web design is to change the appearance of a web page based on the size of the user s display device. This is great for someone visiting your website on a mobile device, but it also provides a responsive experience for the administrators, editors, and content teams working on the other side! All the themes in the Drupal 8 core are responsive, including the default themes Bartik, Seven, and Stark. Their view changes according to the width of the browser window, and the Back to Site button takes the user back to the home page. Drupal 8 s responsive approach is revolutionary because web services have traditionally been used only on websites with services from other sites such as Google Map and Weather forecast. However, web servers have now become more important for regular users due to the proliferation of mobile devices with different display areas such as phones and tablets. RESTful web services like Drupal 8 offer several advantages when designing responsive websites. For example, the improved machine-to-machine (M2M) communication is useful for sharing feeds between Drupal 8 websites. RESTful communication is stateless, meaning data requests are made the same way each time, so there s no need to define the context. The server can also cache data that s frequently requested, which allows the site to handle traffic increases more easily. All core functionality is available through a responsive administration layer...even installation! Current technology allows Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) on the client s side to make the display responsive, but overloaded resources and surplus content often creates display problems for small devices. A web server typically receives a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) from a client s browser and returns the appropriate HTML code. However, servers with web services also need to send data to other servers, which increases the difficulty of designing a responsive website. Drupal 8 is a representational state transfer (REST) web service, meaning that it allows requesting systems to access and modify Web resources with a predefined set of operations. 5

6 WEB SERVICES Web services are supported by the third-party module Services in Drupal 7, but Drupal 8 has a REST module that provides these services. However, the Services module still exists as a separate contributor project. This change allows Drupal 8 to apply web services to the clients browsers, and an application for each platform connects to the web service to obtain the best performance for each device. Drupal 8 also implements Hypertext Application Language (HAL) that allows it to provide more semantic services. Drupal 8 also provides a web service in JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), which is an open standard for transmitting data objects in human-readable format. JSON is the most common format for asynchronous communications between browsers and servers and has largely replaced Extensible Markup Language (XML). The ability to output content to JSON or XML also allows Drupal 8 to use itself as a data source. 6

7 AUTHORING Content editors receive unprecedented power with Drupal 8 s authoring features, especially when writing drafts or creating content on the go. CKEditor is a WYSIWYG editor that s part of the Drupal 8 core. Drupal 8 also uses a drag-and-drop interface to customize CKEditor s toolbar instead of the simple checkbox that Drupal 7 uses. Drupal 8 also allows users to directly edit content on the page, meaning they don t need to navigate to an edit form to configure the text. However, this form is still available to users who want to use it. In-place editing and the WYSIWYG editor are optimized for small screens. The Spark Initiative provides this in-place editing capability, which uses Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) to update the page. Drupal 7 users can edit fields in place with Quick Edit, a Drupal 8 feature that has been backported to Drupal 7. The Media module has been integrated into the core of Drupal 8, which will facilitate the implementation of images and video. 7

8 HTML Editors and publishers don t need to learn HTML to get the most out of Drupal s editing capabilities. HTML5 is the de facto standard for writing web markup and it is now available in Drupal 8. This feature allows users to more easily access input fields such as date, and phone, which is useful for content creation. Users can also easily create custom contact fields by using HTML5 to attach fields to more types of content. Drupal 7 uses the PHPtemplate engine to embed PHP code in HTML, which requires significant skill in writing PHP code. Drupal 8 uses Twig to embed PHP code, which uses a format that s easy for nontechnical users to understand. The combination of Twig with Drupal 8 s new back end allows users with no coding skills to manage themes fairly well. 8

9 MOBILE SUPPORT The widespread use of mobile devices makes mobile support essential for a CMS. The Mobile Initiative makes Drupal 8 mobile friendly, allowing authors and editors to work productively with mobile devices. For example, Drupal 8 automatically changes table sizes to fit any display size. The administration toolbar that s new with Drupal 8 also adjusts for mobile devices. The PHPtemplate engine allows users to download templates and compile them into PHP code that can be stored in memory rather than disk. This capability improves Drupal s page load times, which is especially beneficial for mobile devices with limited storage capacity. Drupal 8 uses Twig to perform this process, which makes templates easier to build and maintain. Twig also prevents Cross Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities from compromising a website s security. 9

10 USER SUPPORT Project Page Guide This is a guided tour for the project management page. 1 of 12 One of Drupal 8 s most helpful features for newcomers is its guided tour. Users can click through a series of tips to learn how views work on the website, get an overview of the administrative interfaces, learn new terminology, and get a step-by-step introduction to configuring components. This feature makes the CMS easier to understand, so it s been well received by users. With more people than ever using mobile devices, the digital experience has to be optimal for visitors and site managers. Drupal 8 does a stellar job of this. 10

11 IT MANAGEMENT IT users of Drupal are primarily interested in the features that are new to Drupal 8 and the new technology that it uses. These features include the following: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT PERFORMANCE MULTILINGUAL SUPPORT OBJECT ORIENTED APPROACH BACKEND CAPABILITIES INDUSTRY STANDARDS 11

12 CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT The CMS capabilities of Drupal have been considerably improved in version 8. Configuration management has been built into Drupal 8 at the file-system level, allowing developers to carry over configuration elements such as content type, fields and views from local development. A version-control system can also track configuration changes more easily in Drupal 8. Drupal 7 saves almost all configuration data in the site database, but Drupal 8 stores most of this data in.yml files. In addition to facilitating version control management, this change also makes it easier for developers to implement Drupal more efficiently in large IT environments with complex CMS setups and large teams. Developers can carry over configuration elements & streamline workflows. The Configuration Management Initiative handles configuration management in Drupal 8. This module manages the various instances of a project such as development, staging and production. It can also view a project s change history, roll back to a previous configuration and migrate configuration settings to another site. Furthermore, Drupal 8 s Configuration Management Initiative can lock down these changes, which is routinely necessary in a production environment. Drupal 8 manages changes to configuration and content separately, allowing developers to take a snapshot of Drupal s entire configuration from a specific point in time. This capability will help streamline technical tasks such as the development, migration and deployment of websites. Changes to configuration settings are saved in both the database and the separate configuration file, allowing version control software to deploy configuration changes. This approach to configuration management allows developers to update content and migrate websites to new environments, which typically occurs when migrating from development to staging or staging to production. 12

13 PERFORMANCE Drupal 8 implements a number of changes that improve performance, especially the load times for pages. For example, Drupal 8 caches all entities on the client computer and only loads scripts when they re needed. This approach means that Drupal 8 can reload the content from cache when a page is viewed multiple times, rather than reloading it from the server. Caching is automatic once it s enabled and properly configured. Drupal 8.1 also introduces the automation of JavaScript (JS) testing, allowing Quality Assurance (QA) personnel to test JS on the front-end automatically. This capability makes the continuous integration of QA much easier on Drupal websites. The Big Pipe component of the Drupal 8 core significantly improves site load times for the end-user. This component is part of the fundamental redesign of Drupal 8 s dynamic web page serving system, which is implemented entirely in JS and PHP. This approach means that Big Pipe doesn t require developers to change a website s existing browsers or servers. Big Pipe breaks web pages down into smaller pieces of data called pagelets, which it then pipelines through web browsers and servers in several stages. This pipelining strategy is similar to that used by modern central processing units (CPUs), in which the CPU optimizes performance by pipelining instructions through multiple execution units. Caching and Big Pipe technology means dramatic improvements in page load times. Drupal 8 requires significantly fewer modules than Drupal 7, and all of them ship with Drupal 8. The implementation of universal unique IDs (UUIDs) in Drupal 8 makes its data structures more uniform than in earlier versions. Before Drupal 8, developers needed an ID for each unit of content such as nodequeue and taxonomy terms. The use of UUIDs for most content types will streamline development, especially for migrations. 13

14 MULTILINGUAL SUPPORT Multilingual capabilities have been built into Drupal 8 from the ground up, and Drupal can be installed in 100 languages. Developers can create pages with the ability to filter views and block visibility based on language. Drupal 8 can also facilitate translation updates automatically, and all translations from the community are built into the administration interface. Drupal 8 offers 100 languages out of the box, with language translation, interface translation, content translation, and configuration management. The Drupal 8 core includes four modules specifically designed to support language and translation functions. They include the Configuration Translation module, which provides an interface for translating configuration settings. The Language module allows users to configure their languages and apply them to page content. The Content Translation module allows users to translate language entities in the content, and the Interface Translation module translates the built-in user interface. 14

15 OBJECT- ORIENTED APPROACH Previous versions of Drupal weren t OOP platforms because they were developed from a non-oop version of PHP. Drupal 8 is moving towards an OOP approach that uses the Symfony framework, although some non- OOP features still remain. OOP provides developers with significant advantages in programming, testing and maintenance. These advantages include a reduction in the amount of custom code in the Drupal core, making it easier to maintain. OOP also improves a website s performance and efficiency as its code base increases. Other benefits of OOP in Drupal include improved multilingual support and partial page caching. 15

16 BACK-END CAPABILITIES Developers have traditionally used Drupal to build website back ends and a scripting language like JS for the front end. Drupal 8 includes major upgrades that improve the interface and user experience when using it to create both front and back ends. Users without coding knowledge can now create the majority of small and medium-size websites. Drupal 8 s back-end interface provides greater flexibility for customizing themes which is highly useful for developers while non-technical users can implement complex functions, which is impractical in other CMSs like WordPress. 16

17 INDUSTRY STANDARDS Drupal 8 provides stronger support for industry standards, allowing developers to implement modern features on their websites. For example, it supports WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative Accessible Rich Internet Applications), a technical specification for increasing the accessibility of web pages. Features like the ARIA Live Announcements API (application programming interface) and TabManager are industry standards that provide greater control over Internet applications. Additional features that make Drupal 8 easier to use include modal dialogs, more font sizes and revised color contrasts. Drupal 8 also allows services to be integrated into the API, which is especially useful for mobile phone applications. With over 200 new features, the capabilities of Drupal 8 allow users to streamline work, improve user experiences, and increase the value of their websites. 17

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