There are lots of goodies coming in Drupal 8. A lot of work has gone into bring Drupal up to modern web standards. In addition to digging into Drupal-specific problems, a lot of work has gone into removing some of the custom overhead we have by incorporating a number of external libraries—that is, code that other communities have created and maintain, and does not live on Drupal.org. Adding external libraries means that we are working with these other open source communities to maintain our code, and that lets us focus on the Drupalisms we need, instead of re-inventing the wheel all over the place. This is the biggest growth for exernal libraries that we've ever seen, and I decided to take a look at what we have in core now.

Drupal 8's out-of-the-box mobile friendliness creates quite the buzz. "Mobile friendly," "responsive," "squishy" — all words to describe the behavior a site invokes on different devices or different screen sizes. Mobile friendly can also mean content first. From a big screen to a little screen, things look different. Images change sizes, menu items become drop-downs, columns are pushed around to locations that make sense with content being the supreme real-estate. So if Drupal is mobile friendly out of the box that must mean I am 100% good to go with all my websites using Drupal 8. We wish. Drupal 8 is coming along and looking pretty sweet, but it is still Drupal and not a magic unicorn. This blog post is not going to get into the nitty gritty of how responsive websites work, but we're going to take a closer look at how two new core modules can make it easier to build a responsive theme. 

When I am theming a Drupal site, I need to know which variables are available on a template file. In Drupal 8, the template engine is Twig, so we’re going to need to know a little bit of Twig to make this work. So, if Twig is totally new to you, don’t worry. Today, you’ll learn some Twig!

With the release of Drupal 8 approaching, it’s time again to answer and update the age old question: What is Drupal?

In Drupal 8, the entire block system got an overhaul, and there are lots of goodies in there. I took a tour of the new system with a short video. Some of the biggest changes to see are that you can now use blocks more than once on your site, and there is a new Custom block library that lets you create block types, which are very much like content types for blocks. They let you add fields to blocks, and give you more fine-grained control over how those fields are displayed depending on the location. Check out the video to see some of this in action.