What's New in Drupal 8

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Alternate resources

Drupalize.Me Guides and Topical Resources

This series of presentations gives an overview of the major changes coming in Drupal 8, and discusses what you will need to learn to get up to speed. This includes Drupal 8 theming, configuration management, object-oriented PHP, entity field API, Drupal 8 blocks and content authoring, mobile and responsive features, enhancing Drupal, multilingual, and best practices of site building.

Tutorials in this course

What's New in Drupal 8: Theming

Theming
Drupal 8
More information

This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about theming based on official releases of Drupal 8, view tutorials in our Drupal 8 Theming Guide.

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title: D8 Theming series
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This presentation outlines some of the major changes to the way that themes are built in Drupal 8 and is intended to help you generate a list of the things you're going to need to know in order to start making awesome Drupal 8 themes. A lot has changed, and there are a lot of new things to learn. However, one of the primary focuses has been on making the theme layer easier to understand, and easier to get started with.

Almost every aspect of the theming layer has been touched in one way or another during the Drupal 8 development cycle. We think some of the important ones to learn about are:

  • How Drupal 8 makes the theme layer easier to understand
  • Changes to help make Drupal responsive and mobile friendly
  • The adoption of current best practices for HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript
  • The addition of a new template engine based on Twig

After watching this presentation you should have a better understanding of the things you'll need to learn in order to create themes in Drupal 8 and where you might need to brush up.

Additional resources

What's New in Drupal 8: Configuration Management

Site Building, Module Development, Site Administration
Drupal 8
More information

This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about configuration management based on official releases of Drupal 8, view tutorials in our Configuration Management series.

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title: Config Management series
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This presentation introduces the Drupal 8 configuration management system (CMI). Learn why configuration management is one of the most eagerly anticipated features of Drupal 8, and how it has the potential to completely change the workflow we use for building sites with Drupal. By addressing a number of long-standing issues in Drupal, CMI helps to separate content from configuration, provides a simple user interface for transporting configuration changes between multiple instances of the same site, and gives developers a consistent way to store and retrieve configuration in their code that is guaranteed to work with the rest of management tools provided.

Here's what we'll cover in this presentation:

  • What is configuration management, and what problems does it solve
  • The CMI user interface, and changes for site-builders
  • The CMI API, and changes for modules developers
  • What you can start learning now to ensure you're ready to use CMI

After watching this presentation you should have a better understanding of the importance of the new configuration management system and be excited about the improved workflows and ability to follow current best practices that it introduces to Drupal.

Additional resources

What's New in Drupal 8: Object-Oriented PHP

Module Development
Drupal 8
More information

This tutorial provides an overview of the major shift in Drupal 8 to an object-oriented architecture and was created to help you understand which concepts and terminology you will need to learn in order to interact with modules at a code level.

Other tutorials in this series on "What's New in Drupal 8" will cover major changes in specific areas of Drupal 8 module development, such as entities and fields, configuration management, web services, and hooks. This tutorial will focus on object-oriented PHP architectural changes, concepts, and terminology you will need to know as a module developer.

Specifically, we will present:

  • an overview of object-oriented PHP
  • why it was introduced into Drupal 8
  • how it differs from procedural programming
  • major OO-PHP concepts you'll find in core

To learn object-oriented PHP, you should begin with our OOP topic page.
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title: OOP topic
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Additional resources

What's New in Drupal 8: Entity Field API

Free
Module Development
Drupal 8
More information

This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. To learn about Drupal 8's new Entity API, take a look at our Entity API series.

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title: Entity API series
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In this presentation we're going to take a high-level look at the new Drupal 8 Entity Field API. This is an improved version of the Entity API and Field API that was started in Drupal 7. Entities are the new recommended way of dealing with data in Drupal and as such, familiarizing yourself with the workings of the Entity API will be important when it comes time to store or retrieve data from your custom modules. It's a big change from what we're used to in Drupal—directly accessing the database via the database abstraction layer—but the Entity Field API also has some distinct advantages.

This presentation covers:

  • Improvements to the Entity API
  • Improvements to the Field API
  • Handlers, Controllers, and ways to manipulate entities
  • Discussion of new types of things we can build with these changes
  • What you can do to start learning now

After watching this presentation you should be able to articulate the improvements made to the Entity Field API in Drupal 8 and start to understand how you might make use of it in your own code. We'll also cover some of the things you can start doing now in order to prepare yourself to use the Entity Field API in Drupal 8.

Additional resources

What's New in Drupal 8: Blocks

Site Building, Site Administration
Drupal 8
More information

Blocks have always been a part of Drupal and have always been a very limiting way of putting content on your site. Just to make it a usable system, contributed modules were almost always required. Drupal 8 has come a long way and has added much needed functionality to the core block system.

In this presentation we will cover what is new when it comes to the block system in Drupal 8 and the advantages that it offers.

What is different?

  • Custom blocks, and blocks in general, can be used more than once
  • A block title is now an on/off check box instead of having to use <none>
  • A block can be placed in more than one region
  • You can create "block types" much like content types
  • The UI is easier to use with new blocks now in a sidebar instead of at the bottom
  • This sidebar UI allows for dynamic filtering to make it even easier to find a block
  • Configurations of block types and layout are now in code
  • Blocks are plugins

To learn more about blocks, refer to our Blocks topic page.

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title: Blocks topic
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Additional resources

What's New in Drupal 8: Content Authoring

Site Building, Site Administration
Drupal 8
More information

Drupal 8 has done quite a few things to make things much easier for site builders to empower content creators. There are more tools in core that tremendously help content creators to quickly add and edit content. These tools are also mobile-friendly which makes content editing possible across more devices.

New features in core for content editors:

  • Text formats and editor configuration
  • CKEditor
  • Drag and drop editor toolbar configuration
  • Image captions
  • Quick edit
  • Better preview with view mode options
  • Responsive and mobile-friendly interface

How do these changes help? To start; currently you need to add modules and outside editors just to get an editor in Drupal. The configuration of that editor is very cumbersome with lots of checkboxes and a very unfriendly UI. Besides a better user experience when it comes to configuring the authoring experience, adding and editing content on the go via mobile devices is a must have for today's modern CMS.

Additional resources

Drupal 8: WYSIWYG and In-Line Editing

What's New in Drupal 8: Mobile and Responsive Features

Site Building, Module Development, Site Administration
Drupal 8
More information

This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about responsive design tools based on official releases of Drupal 8, view tutorials in our Responsive Web Design topic.

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title: Responsive Web Design topic
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Drupal 8 is now a friend of mobile—mobile users, mobile developers, and even mobile site administrators. In this presentation, we'll look at the variety of mobile-friendly features added to Drupal 8 in the areas of site administration, site building, and module development.

"Mobile" means different things to different folks. For a content editor, being able to quickly update a piece of content from any device means one less barrier to getting a task done, when and where they want. For a developer, the prospect of diving into web services and building APIs that can be used for mobile apps or in conjunction with the latest Javascript framework is empowering and exciting, especially since the work of structuring entities and fields and administrating content can stay in Drupal. For the site builder, who simply wants to quickly get a site up and running out-of-the-box with a theme that "just works on mobile," the default responsive theme, Bartik, is a time-saver for sure.

By the end of this lesson, you'll have a better idea of the depth and breadth of what "mobile" means for Drupal 8 users of all kinds.

Additional resources

What's New in Drupal 8: Extending and Enhancing Drupal

Module Development
Drupal 8
More information

This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about Drupal 8 module development based on official releases of Drupal 8, view tutorials in our Drupal 8 Module Development series.
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title: Drupal 8 Module Development Guide
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One of the things that makes Drupal an attractive platform for developers to build their applications with is its extensibility. If you've ever used a contributed module, or written your own, you've taken advantage of this fact. Almost everything about the way that Drupal core works can be altered, extended or even replaced in order to allow developers total control. Historically that's always been done by implementing hooks. In Drupal 8 however, we've got some new tools to allow module developers to extend, alter, and enhance core's functionality.

In this presentation we'll take a high-level look at these new options, including:

  • The role of hooks in Drupal 8
  • The new plugin system for adding functionality
  • Using routes to map HTTP requests to custom code
  • Events and event listeners
  • The service container and adding new services
  • Using the Entity API for data storage

After watching this presentation you should have basic knowledge of the various ways in which Drupal 8 can be extended, and when to use each one. You'll also get information about what you can do now to start preparing for using these new tools.

Additional resources

API Documentation on api.drupal.org:

Articles and Video Tutorials:

DrupalCon:

Drupal's Change log:

What's New in Drupal 8: Multilingual

Site Building, Theming, Module Development
Drupal 8
More information

This video was part of a series of presentations produced in anticipation of Drupal 8's official release. For information about multilingual sites based on official releases of Drupal 8, take a look at our Multilingual sites topic.

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title: Multilingual sites topic
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This presentation outlines some of the major changes to the Drupal core multilingual system. A lot of features that were in contributed modules have been rolled into core, and a number of existing multilingual features have been greatly improved. There are a lot of cool new things to get up to speed with. In this video, we'll review:

  • New and obsolete modules
  • UI changes
  • Developer changes

After watching this presentation you should have a better understanding of the things you'll need to learn to get up to speed with the new multilingual features in Drupal 8, including things to watch for on the module development and theming sides.

Additional resources

Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative site
Gábor Hojtsy's Multilingual Changes Summary (PDF)

What's New in Drupal 8: Site Building Best Practices

Site Building, Theming
Drupal 8
More information

This presentation walks through quite a long list of major contributed modules and best practices that have been incorporated into Drupal 8 core. There are a lot of new features that you'll get out of the box, from Views to Services. In particular we'll cover:

  • Exactly what best practices mean
  • How core and contributed modules help the community define best practices
  • List the major categories of features that have been incorporated

After watching this presentation you should have a better understanding of what best practices are, and a list of the major contributed modules from Drupal 7 that have been added, in one form or another, into Drupal 8.