What's new with Drupal 8?
Greetings! We took a week off last week to attend BADCamp. There was sprinting-o-plenty, as well as tons of sessions on Drupal 8.
Photo credit: Amazee Labs
In the meantime, a lovely new Drupal 8 landing page has launched, which includes a list of major new features, information about the current state of the release, and a nice, big, green, demo button!
There's also been movement to create and centralize expanded Drupal 8 developer API documentation on Drupal.org, including sections on the new routing system and the new entity API.
And speaking of Drupal.org, don't forget to get your patches downloaded in advance of the Drupal.org D7 launch, when d.o will be down for 24 hours. Please take the opportunity to go outdoors in the sun and otherwise step away from the computer. :)
Notable Commits
The best of git log --since "2 weeks ago" --pretty=oneline (121 commits in total):
- Issue #2099363 by tim.plunkett, mtift, swentel: Allow single config files to be imported and exported is another super handy patch. This takes the Views import/export functionality from Drupal 7 (which allows you to easily copy/paste Views definitions between sites) and expands it out to cover any configuration file in the system! An awesome feature, for both site builders and developers.
- From front-end performance land, Issue #2120457 by Wim Leers, nod_: Add test to guarantee that the Standard profile does not load any JavaScript ensures that Drupal 8 serves no JS to anonymous users, to keep page loads for those users nice and speedy.
- Issue #2112807 by tim.plunkett: Move the form builder functions in form.inc to a form service: This snazzy patch moves the guts of includes/form.inc to OO code in the form of FormBuilderInterface, and increases the unit test coverage from 0% to 70% in the process. Awesome work!
- Two big patches went in for improving Drupal 8's accessibility: Issue #1872206 by jessebeach, quicksketch, Wim Leers, mgifford: Fixed Improve CKEditor toolbar configuration accessibility, which provides both an accessible way to create CKEditor toolbars in the admin interface, as well as makes those toolbars output markup accessible to end-users, and Issue #1851414 by nod_, quicksketch, frega, dawehner, damiankloip: Convert Views to use the abstracted dialog modal., which replaced Views's custom JS with the standard dialog library used throughout core. Win!
- In Developer Experience land, Issue #2057259 by alexpott, cweagans, swentel: Fixed Malformed modulename.info.yml file causes fatal error greatly helps to reduce brittleness in error handling, Issue #2107137 by dawehner, damiankloip, tim.plunkett: Fix the DX for declaring custom access checkers provides a much less verbose option for folks who just want to stick an access method on their controllers and use it, Issue #2112711 by tim.plunkett: Provide an easier mechanism for using drupal_get_form() directly nicely cleans up form builder calls, and Issue #2098795 by tim.plunkett, Sean Charles, tstoeckler, dawehner, larowlan, damiankloip: Create Base Class for RouteSubscriber Class makes defining routes much easier, by consolidating commonly-used properties into a base class.
- Meanwhile, in Router System Conversion Ville, Issue #2102125 by dawehner, tim.plunkett, neclimdul, pwolanin, YesCT, damiankloip, Tim Bozeman: Big Local Task Conversion went in, to move all local tasks to the new routing system. Work is still ongoing to replace theme callback and convert contextual links. On the bright side, Issue #2046367 by jhodgdon, amateescu, larowlan, juanolalla: Menu routing docs do not match what the code is doing will help folks figure out the new routing system much better now. :)
- In the ongoing quest to create dream markup, Issue #1982256 by mortendk, rteijeiro, tim.plunkett, LewisNyman, tlattimore, yannickoo, ry5n: Clean up html.html.twig markup removes numerous extraneous divs and classes from Drupal's default markup, which can be added back by themes that need them.
- And finally, a follow-up from an old security fix in Drupal 7, Issue #1934498 by attiks, Jelle_S, David_Rothstein, effulgentsia, tstoeckler: Allow the image style 'itok' token to be suppressed in image derivative URLs cleans things up so derivative images can work once again on CDNs and whatnot.
Drupal 8 Around the Interwebs
Blog posts about Drupal 8 and how much it's going to rock your face.
- If you're a book author, trainer, etc. don't miss Survey Results: Drupal 8 Information Needs, which has lots of helpful graphs about what people want to know about Drupal 8. A must-read for documentation writers, trainers, book authors, bloggers, and screencasters! :)
- In Getting Excited for Drupal 8 - The Donkey, Human, Ant, Chameleon CMS, several core contributors chime in on what gets them excited about Drupal 8.
- If you want to stay up to date on the latest happenings with Drupal 8's upcoming Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 => Drupal 8 migration path, you can subscribe to the The IMP initiative: Migrate in Core issue, where ongoing updates will be posted. You can also read a progress report of what's happened at BADCamp and since.
- Why PHP is for Real attempts to contextualize some of the big OO shifts in Drupal 8's architecture with some historical insight about the PHP project.
- Dynamic Routes in Drupal 8 with a RouteSubscriber covers how to convert from old hook_menu()-style routes to the new system in Drupal 8, and Drupal 8 - New comment notifications provides a handy, short module for automating mail sending in D8.
- In Focusing on Contrib for Drupal 8, Chris Brown makes the case for why developers should start focusing on D8 contrib now, from a career development point of view.
Drupal 8 in "Real Life
- Two sprints are coming up in the next week: another edition of "First Friday" Contrib Sprint Initiative (CSI) (read about the results from last time) and the
Drupal 8 Tour Writing Sprint, to help get additional site builder tutorials into core. - Drupalhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark will also cover a number of Drupal 8 topics, including Twig, technologies such as Guzzle and Symfony, the new plugin system, and even a talk about the TYPO3 CMS.
- Later on this month, don't miss DrupalCamp Vienna with a series of sprints in addition to Drupal 8 trainings.
Whew! That's a wrap!
Do you follow Drupal Planet with devotion, or keep a close eye on the Drupal event calendar, or git pull origin 8.x every morning without fail before your coffee? We're looking for more contributors to help compile these posts. You could either take a few hours once every six weeks or so to put together a whole post, or help with one section more regularly. Contact xjm if you'd like to help communicate all the interesting happenings in Drupal 8!