7 New Improvements You’ll See in Drupal 8.2

7 New Improvements You'll See in Drupal 8.2

The Beta version of Drupal 8.2 has arrived and is ready for testing.

There are many upgrades to the developer experience, but what changes will end-users see?

Here are 7 improvements that users will see in Drupal 8.2. (Update: here are 3 more!)

Improvement #1. Revisions are on by default

This is a small, but useful change. All content types now have revisions enabled by default:

Revision settings in Drupal 8.2

Improvement #2. The Place Blocks module

This is an experimental module that you’ll need to enable. The module is designed to add a visual page builder element to Drupal.

  • Enable the “Place block” module.
  • You’ll see a “Place block” link to the admin toolbar:
The Place block link in the Admin toolbar
  • Click the link and you’ll see the theme layout with a “Place block” button in each region:
The Place block links in the region map
  • Click the button, and you’ll get a choice of blocks to add:
Placing blocks in Drupal 8

Improvement #3. Link to items after saving

Whenever you save an item in Drupal 8, you’ll now see a direct link to the item:

Link to items after saving in Drupal 8.2

Improvement #4. Contact forms have a redirect link

With modules like Webform still waiting for a Drupal 8 release, the focus is improving the default contact forms.

In Drupal 8.2, you can now redirect users to a thank you page, after they submit a form:

Contact forms have a redirect path in Drupal 8.2

Improvement #5. View modes for your comments

This is a feature that was left half-finished in earlier version of Drupal 8. It was possible to create view modes for your comments, but they were very hard to use. With Drupal 8.2, you can choose a view mode from inside the “Manage Display” for your content types. Here’s how it works:

  • Go to Structure > Display modes > View modes.
A new comments view mode
  • Structure > Comment types > Manage display.
  • Click “Custom Display Settings”.
  • You can now choose the view mode you just created, as in the image below:
Custom Display Settings in Drupal 8.2
  • Click “Save”.
  • You can now re-arrange the fields for this view mode.
  • Click “Save” when you have arranged the fields.
  • Go to Structure > Content types > Manage display.
Applying a comment view mode to a field
  • You can now choose a view mode for your comments.

Improvement #6. CKEditor looks more like Drupal

If you use CKEditor’s inline editing, the pop-ups will now look much more like Drupal than CKEditor.

Here’s an image showing their appearance in Drupal 8.1:

CKEditor popup in Drupal 8.1

And here is the Drupal 8.2 version:

CKEditor popup in Drupal 8.2

Improvement #7. The migration path

There are three “experimental” migration modules in the Drupal 8 core still: Migrate, Migrate Drupal, and Migrate Upgrade UI.

They’ve been improved in Drupal 8.2, but where does that leave the migration path?

  • The Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 migration is now complete and can be used!
  • The Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration is still not finished. There are over a dozen critical issues left to solve before the D7 to D8 path is considered stable.

Author

  • Steve Burge

    Steve is the founder of OSTraining. Originally from the UK, he now lives in Sarasota in the USA. Steve's work straddles the line between teaching and web development.

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chrisshattuck
chrisshattuck
8 years ago

You’re awesome, Steve. 🙂

steve
steve
8 years ago
Reply to  chrisshattuck

@chrisshattuck Lol. I try 🙂 But the release team do such a good job with their notes that it’s fairly quick to track this stuff down [url=https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/releases/8.2.0-beta1]https://www.drupal.org/proj…[/url]

leo pathu
leo pathu
8 years ago

Wow ! much improvements in drupal 8.2 ,

Damien McKenna
Damien McKenna
8 years ago

They added Workbench Moderation to core today, so you need to expand the list to 8 🙂 [url=https://www.drupal.org/node/2725533]https://www.drupal.org/node…[/url]
This is excellent work from everyone involved, I can’t wait to start upgrading some sites to using it.

steve
steve
8 years ago
Reply to  Damien McKenna

@DamienMcKenna Yes, that is excellent news, thanks Damien. Sounds like there might be more to come to, before the first RC arrives.

Alexei Raiu
Alexei Raiu
8 years ago

Thank you, an interesting overview!

steve
steve
8 years ago
Reply to  Alexei Raiu

@alexrayu Thanks

Yves Malouin
Yves Malouin
8 years ago

Thank you Steve! Although, I wiil not get back to Drupal until they get ‘Medias’ back in and working. At this point Drupal is useless if you need to manage plenty of images, without being able to preview these, through thumbnails.

steve
steve
8 years ago
Reply to  Yves Malouin

@yvesmalouin You won’t get any argument from me on that. Media in Drupal really needs improvement.

Kyle Browning
Kyle Browning
8 years ago

You missed the numerous REST API improvements.

steve
steve
8 years ago
Reply to  Kyle Browning

@kylebrowning Will users see those? That was focus of this list.

Kyle Browning
Kyle Browning
8 years ago
Reply to  steve

Great point! 😛

steve
steve
8 years ago
Reply to  Kyle Browning

@kylebrowning Thanks. I do see your point though. A follow-up post on 8.2’s developer features would be a good idea.

Dennis Sørensen
Dennis Sørensen
8 years ago

Very cool 🙂

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