If you've been following along with the Drupal core development cycle you might already know that new minor versions of Drupal 8 are released roughly every 6 months. We're happy to celebrate the release of Drupal 8.4 yesterday! Let's take a look at a few of the new features that have been added to this release.
3rd-party project upgrades
Several of Drupal's dependencies and third party libraries have been upgraded to newer versions in this release. Symfony has been updated to version 3.2, jQuery to version 3, jQuery UI to 1.12.1, CKEditor to 4.7.1, and PHPUnit to 4.8.35. These updates have largely been made to remain up to date with currently supported software. This is why Drupal has also discontinued official support for Internet Explorer 9 and 10. The Drupal community has also adopted a new style guide for JavaScript code, specifically Airbnb's style guide version 14.1.
New stable core modules
Several previously experimental modules have made continued progress towards stability and have had their experimental label removed with this release. These modules are all now official stable core modules in 8.4:
- DateTime Range
- Layout Discovery
- Media (core api, based on media entity module)
- Inline Form Errors
Large amounts of work have been committed to improve the workflow and content moderation capabilities of Drupal core. The Workflows module, which provides an API that makes content moderation possible, has now reached stable status. The Content Moderation module, however, is still considered experimental. It won't be able to reach full stability until additional functionality has been added and tested.
There has also been a large push during this release to improve the REST & API-first capabilities of core, as well as the suite of Migrate modules and test coverage.
Keeping tutorials up-to-date
We've read through the changelog and release notes for the alpha, beta, and both of the release candidates to ensure that our tutorials are up to date and accurate. So rest assured that you have the most accurate tutorials you can find. The biggest change of note for the overall community is that working with Drupal 8.4 now requires a version of Drush greater than or equal to 8.1.12 as noted on our Drush topic page.
What new features would you like to see in the 8.5 release? The development branch is already open and accepting contributions.
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