Our speaker tonight is not able to make it due to illness. We will be watching a video presentation on "What's New in Drupal 8" by Chris Weber of TheNerdery.com. He gave this presentation to his Drupal User group.
http://vimeo.com/40266383
While I was searching the Internet for a good video to show tonight, I did some research on the new features in Drupal 8. The following article outlines what I found. Credits:
http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/whats-new-drupal-8
Drupal 8 has been in development since March 2011 and is now in Feature Freeze. This means that no new features will be added to Drupal 8. Drupal 8 is planned to be released in Sept. 2013. Here is a brief description of the new changes in Drupal 8:
Theming Changes
- Drupal 7 uses PHPTemplate to produce themes
- Drupal 8 will be using the Twig framework theming engine
- Twig will simplify theming by using better code. See Jen Lampton’s talk at DrupalCon Sydney –
(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGIqu_Te0PA&feature=youtu.be)
- Twig allows templates to be compiled down to PHP code which is stored in RAM for superior performance as it reduces disk access
Drupal 8 will be Mobile-friendly
- The default themes that ship with Drupal 8, Stark, Bartik and Seven (admin theme) will become responsive, meaning that the presentation changes based on the browser width
- Drupal’s admin pages will now be mobile-friendly. Look for new toolbars with icons.
Improved Content Creation
- Drupal 8 will support inline editing. This allows content to be updated directly on the page rather than going to a separate edit form. Note that the familiar edit page workflow will still be possible
- This will use the Spark project, a Drupal 7 distribution by Acquia (drupal.org/project/spark)
Views is now in Core
- Every Drupal site uses Views to list content on the page and now Views is in core. This will make things simpler when users need to customize lists of content. Instead of making a fresh view or modifying it drastically, developers can simply modify the view.
Configuration management
- With Configuration management, developers will be take a snapshot of all the site configuration at a specific point in time. This builds on the Features module that saves Drupal configuration in code. Configuration management will streamline development, deployment and help with migrations. When a setting is changed, it will be saved in a config file as well as saved to the database. This will also allow all configuration to be saved in version control.
Multi-lingual
- Drupal 8 will be multi-lingual out of the box. Interface and content translation built into core. You can get translations directly from localize.drupal.org. There will be more consistent APIs for developers along with usability improvements.
Back-end Improvements
- Symfony2, an object-oriented application framework, will be part of Core and will provide multiple benefits:
o Partial page caching
o Higher performance and efficiency
o Easier to maintain Drupal Core as custom code is reduced
o Improved multi-lingual support
Universal Unique IDs (UUIDs)
- In previous versions of Drupal, you had IDs for nodes, taxonomy terms and many other units of content. And these IDs could change when you ported over the content to your production site. With universal unique IDs, development will be more streamlined and help with better migration.
Resources:
1. Feb. 7, 2013 DrupalCon Sydney Video: Twig and the new theme layer in Drupal 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGIqu_Te0PA&feature=youtu.be
2. Feb. 6, 2012 Blog Post: What’s New in Drupal 8?
http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/whats-new-drupal-8
3. Apr. 12, 2012 Video: What’s New in Drupal 8?
http://vimeo.com/40266383
4. Oct. 5, 2012 Podcast: Drupal 8 Initiatives
http://www.lullabot.com/podcasts/drupalizeme-podcast-3-3-ws-drupal-8-initiatives-who-what-and-why
5. June 2, 2012 Angie Byron ‘s talk at DrupalCamp Vancouver
http://webchick.net/drupal-8-slides
6. Oct. 2012 What’s Planned for Drupal 8
http://drupalwatchdog.com/2/2/drupal-8-preview 
