Drupal 8 Brings New Things but Leaves a Few Things Behind

Image

Pruning Drupal Core is just Part of the Upgrade

When Drupal 8 ships, site administrators and site builders will notice lots of new, shiny features. Most of these we've already covered in this series of blog posts—Learning from Trial and Error. But one thing that may take a bit to notice are those things that have been pruned. Unless you have a need for these features, you won’t really notice they've been pulled from Core and no longer in existence or now exist as contributed modules. Let’s take a look at what's been removed: (source):

• Blog module - Use content types, fields, and the Views module (now in core) to build a blog. The legacy Blog module is also now available as a contributed project.
• Dashboard module - The Dashboard module is now available as a contributed project.
• Garland theme
• Number module - Moved to D8 core field
• List module - Merged into D8 core’s Option module
• OpenID module - The OpenID module is now available as a contributed project.
• Overlay module - The new Drupal 8 toolbar now includes a contextually aware “back to site” button that serves the same use-case as overlay by allowing site users to return from the admin context to the page that they were on.
• PHP filter module
• Poll module - The Poll module is now available as a contributed project. There are also other contributed modules that provide polling functionality.
• Profile module - Attach fields to users or use the contrib Profile 2 module.
• Trigger module - The Rules contributed module provides similar functionality. The legacy Trigger module is also now available as a contributed project.

Pruning Drupal Core and adding to it are not the only things that have changed in Drupal 8. This version has a new set of requirements that are necessary to get things up and running.

• MySQL 5.0.15/MariaDB/Percona/equivalent or higher with PDO and an InnoDB-compatible primary storage engine, PostgreSQL 8.3 or higher with PDO, SQLite 3.3.7 or higher
• PHP 5.4 or higher with the CURL extension.
• Drupal 8 can no longer be installed on hosts with the ‘magic_quotes_gpc’, ‘magic_quotes_runtime’, or ‘safe_mode’ PHP ini settings turned on; these settings are deprecated in PHP 5.3 and have no effect anymore in PHP 5.4.
• Drupal 8 core PHP memory requirements are in flux, but setting to 128 MB should be enough.

As of this writing, Drupal 8 is in beta. Although in beta, please remember that any of the above could change at any moment. Until the final release of Drupal 8, things will be changing constantly as our community continues working to make Drupal 8 stable.