Drupal 8 for site builders

While there has been whispers about Drupal 8 for some while now, realistically for many people in the Drupal-system we’re too busy doing work using the incumbent Drupal 7 version to investigate the new and shiny version.

Ashish Thakur bravely attempted a live demo using someone else’s computer on an OS he wasn’t familiar with (Mac) to show what it’s like for a site builder to use Drupal 8.

There have been a few changes. There are 30 modules now in core (no more having to wait 6 months for Views to be stable and then having to install it) as well as the removal of 10 modules (no more nasty PHP, the confusing blog module or menus as well as others).

.@Ashish_Thakur explaining changes in D8 from a site builder perspective.30 new modules in core,10 removed #dclondon pic.twitter.com/RREmr1GnPY

— David Rozas (@drozas) March 1, 2015

There were also some interesting changes of note. One is that there is now a Medium-like inline editing available for nodes (though I had to admit that I struggled to find how to access this later on when using a demo site). There is also far more flexibility in blocks compared to Drupal 7 (where you have to do such kludges as installing extra modules to make blocks appear in more than one place), particularly the ability to add fields to them.

All in all, it looks interesting and potentially solving some of the back end issues that plague Drupal 7.