5 New Features You’ll See in Drupal 8.6
Drupal releases major updates only twice per year: in March/April and also in September/October.
Drupal 8.6 is the major update for September 2018.
Let’s dive in and discover what new features we’ll see. Some of the Drupal 8.6 improvements are outstanding!
New Feature #1. Demo Data
For the very first time, you can install Drupal and get a whole demo site to explore. If you install Drupal using your browser, you’ll see a new option: “Demo: Umami Food Magazine”.
After you complete your Drupal installation, your site will be populated with dummy content for a food magazine.
There are about 20 sample content items in the Umami demo. Many of them are in a sample content type called “Recipe”. It looks like the demo data was chosen to give a good overview of multiple different field types.
There also a couple of landing pages, created with sample Views. All-in-all the demo data is short and sweet but it does look much better than a plain Drupal install.
New Feature #2. Media Library
Finally we’re getting somewhere with media in Drupal! For many years, Drupal has shipped with almost no media handling. This is the most commonly requested feature whenever we do Drupal training.
Since the release of Drupal 8.4 in late 2017, Drupal has had some new media handling features. But, they were still very limited. With Drupal 8.6, we take a big step forward. There is now a “Media Library” module in the core. It is in the “Experimental” stage, so you’ll need to enable the module:
To use the new library, create a field using the “Media” type. It will show as an “Entity reference”.
When you go to create content using this field type, you can click “Browse media” or “Add media”.
You’ll be able to search through all the images uploaded to your site and choose the file you need. This is a huge – and long overdue – step forward for Drupal. This Media library is created using Views, so you can customize this screen however you wish.
New Feature #3: YouTube and Vimeo Embeds
In addition to the new media library, Drupal 8.6 also has improved support for remote embeds.
- Create a field using the “Media” type and select the “Remote video” option.
- Go to Content > Media > Add media.
- Click “Remote video”.
- Enter a YouTube or Vimeo URL.
- Click “Save”.
- Now when you go to create content with a video field, you can click “Browse media”:
- You can choose the video that you added earlier:
The idea is that you save your content and see the URL automatically turned into a video on the front of your site. However, in my testing, I wasn’t able to successfully select videos and click “Select media”. Perhaps the bugs will be squeezed out before the final release.
However, in addition to the bugs, the workflow for this embedding is still clunky. You have to add the video before you create content, which is a significant hurdle for content creators.
New Feature #4. Layouts
Drupal’s layout builder features continue to get better, although the two key modules are still experimental: Field Layout and Layout Builder. Enable both of those modules if you want to test the layout options.
You can enable the layout features for each content type individually.
- Go to Structure > Content types.
- Edit a content type and click “Manage display”.
- Check “Use Layout Builder.
- Check “
- Click the “Manage layout” button.
You’ll now be taken to the front of your site, where you control the layout for this content type.
- Click “Add Section” and you’ll be able to choose from “One column”, “Two column” and other options.
In this image below, I’ve chose a new “Two column” layout. Confusingly, you will now see an “Add Block” link. This is confusing because, as we’ll see, you can actually add much more than just a block.
When you click “Add Block”, you’ll be able to choose from almost all the data on your site. You can add fields, user data, forms, views and much, much more. This option allows you add almost any site feature to your new layout.
One of the most interesting things about this layout option applies to much more than just content types. You can use these layouts for media, contact forms, taxonomy, users, and more. I’m in the camp that feels that WordPress’ Gutenberg editor is a good idea with poor execution. In contrast, the Drupal team seems to have done an outstanding job with this new layout builder. If you’re a WordPress user, this new Drupal layout editor feels closer to a full-page designer like Beaver Builder or Elementor than it does to Gutenberg.
New Feature #5. Workspaces
The Workspaces feature allows you to prepare and preview your entire page before publishing it. Workspaces is still in the experimental stage, so you will need to actively enable the module. Two things to note about this feature:
- It’s not yet compatible with Drupal 8’s content moderation features. You do need to remove some key moderation features before enabling Workspaces.
- Don’t confuse “Workspaces” and “Workflows”. Workflows is a different feature, related to content moderation.
Let’s see how to use Workspaces.
- After enabling Workspaces, go to a URL on the front of your site. You’ll see a green “Live” button in the top-right corner.
- Click the green “Live” link.
- Click the “Stage” link on the left-side of the black banner.
- Now you can activate the “Stage” workspace. Be careful because the “Cancel” button is where you’d expect the “Confirm” button to be.
- Make changes to your content on this page. Any changes will not be publicly visible, even if you save them.
- Click the orange “Stage” button.
- Click the “Deploy content” button and you can make your changes live on your site.
I did find some bugs with this Workspaces feature, and the UI is a little clunky. You can see some mistakes in the image above. But overall, this is another excellent new feature in Drupal 8.
Bonus: Migration
Drupal 8’s migration modules are almost all stable! The one exception is new “Migrate Drupal Multilingual” module which is new and experimental.
This is way too late of course. Drupal 8 launched three years ago and only now do we have a stable migration path. It seems fair to guess that this significantly slowed the adoption of Drupal 8.
My Drupal 8.6 Summary
Gabor Hojtsy, who’s heavily involved with Drupal development, called this the biggest update in Drupal 8’s history. He’s not wrong. If you want to compare, check out our recaps of previous releases, Drupal 8.1, Drupal 8.2, Drupal 8.3, Drupal 8.4 and Drupal 8.5.
Drupal 8.6 really shows the potential of Drupal 8’s release cycle and is full of useful, well-executed improvements.
What features are you excited to use in 8.6?
Field Layout is not required for Layout Builder.
Thanks Brian
What site is not multilingual? What is still missing in Migrate Drupal Multilingual? I18n migration or D7 core stuff, too?
Hi Marc. I’m not an expert on Migrate, but it looks like mulitlingual is responsible for several there criticial issues still https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/search/drupal?text=&assigned=&submitted=&project_issue_followers=&status%5B%5D=Open&issue_tags_op=%3D&issue_tags=Migrate+critical
Based on module usage stats on drupal.org, about 20% of all D6 and D7 sites use multilingual modules. So spinning that out of the migrate ecosystem as a separate experimental module let’s us stabilize the “One Click” multilingual upgrade process for this 20%. While still letting the rest of the world that doesn’t have multilingual, proceed on a stable upgrade path. If you want to help stabilize multilingual migrations, head over to https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2208401.
However, just because we say that multlingual migrations aren’t stable, that only means the one click upgrade isn’t ready. There are many reports of large multilingual migrations that have been executed, even as long ago as 2 years. I was personally involved with a large 4 language site we upgraded from Drupal 7 to Drupal earlier this year. It went very well and the client was quite happy with the results. It took a single developer ~200-250 hours. But this also included site-building and migrating from field collections to paragraphs, plain file to Media ecosystem, etc and other tasks too.
Full disclosure, I’m a Core migrate subsystem maintainer.
Thanks for a such detailed overview, heddn
Plus a major aspect is that there are several ways of setting up i18n in D6/7 which is now standardized in D8. It’ll take a bit of effort to setup migration paths between all of the i18n configurations in D6/7 until it can be considered “stable”.
Thanks for the write up Steve. Suggestion for this article’s title would be “Drupal finally gets Sample Data and 4 new ‘Experimental’ stage features that you need to enable yourself and use with caution going forward.”
Thanks Justin. Yes, true 🙂 Experimental modules are a great idea in theory, but it’s difficult when they can only get updated every 6 months. I suspect the Drupal team would like to iterate on them faster.
Thanks, Steve. amazing article, wish you & other OSTraining staff the best.
Thanks Mohammad. Glad it’s helpful!
I’m very excited about the new layout system and the improving media system. I wish it was all coming faster, but I prefer stable over fast. It’s still challenging to build a D8 site because of the uncertainty of which layout and media contrib modules to use. I’ll be very happy when I no longer have to make a choice between Display Suite, Panels or some other system.
Thanks Doug. Yes, it seems like it can take 3 or 4 release cycles for these features to move from experimental to core … that’s often 2 years before they become stable.
Loved the changes being made to Layouts and Dummy Content. Painful UX with Media Embeds, so Drupal way is, Add the Streaming Video somewhere else. Then Go to your Content and then Fetch that Content (YouTube/Vimeo), counter-intuitive. this is when Drupal says This is how I (Drupal as a System) want you to use the Media Embed.
Also, regarding your comment on Gutenberg being a good idea with bad execution. I disagree. Its a good idea very carefully being executed. They have 3 Phase for Gutenberg (1. Content Creation ONLY (Page/Post), 2. Page Templates, 3. Full Site Customization) and right now they are focused on getting the functionality and UX of Phase 1 right.
Thanks Naushad. With Gutenberg, I love the idea but definitely find it hard to use compared to alternatives. The block UI keep tripping me up – I always seems to be hunting around for where to click.
Steve, i am a Designer and i am actually writing a Blog post on how Drupal can take cues to Improve the usability across the Important modules (Note i didn’t mention core modules).
Just an example: Here the Speaker at DrupalCon Nashville was presenting how BPM can be used to give the functionality on the like of Gutenberg ( I love that it can be achieved, only concern is usability).
Here, one of the audience member stands up to ask, “I didn’t see any paragraphs”. The video is long, but you can fasw-forward first section and then jump to this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AClSyOC2KKk&feature=youtu.be&t=2745
Contrast this with what happens in WordPress Gutenberg Usability Testing, they’re nailing down usability issues piece by piece.
Summary: Drupal needs to consider Important modules as a part of Usability core. I hope Drupal takes same approach for becoming even better.
Many thanks for this, Naushad. I’ve seen quite a few people compare Gutenberg to Paragraphs.
This is a little bit off topic but for YouTube and Vimeo Embeds, I use this module “Url to Video Filter”. It works very well. Simply paste your youtube or Vimeo url in editor and the url is converted into a video player. I request a feature, support youtube URL with parameter like ?rel=0, and it was added. So for me, this a perfect solution to embed videos.
Can drupal be used to build a video rental website. Where visitors can make a purchase and then get 48 hours access to watch a streaming video?