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:
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:
- Click the link and you’ll see the theme layout with a “Place block” button in each region:
- Click the button, and you’ll get a choice of blocks to add:
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:
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:
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.
- Structure > Comment types > Manage display.
- Click “Custom Display Settings”.
- You can now choose the view mode you just created, as in the image below:
- 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.
- 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:
And here is the Drupal 8.2 version:
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.
You’re awesome, Steve. 🙂
@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]
Wow ! much improvements in drupal 8.2 ,
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.
@DamienMcKenna Yes, that is excellent news, thanks Damien. Sounds like there might be more to come to, before the first RC arrives.
Thank you, an interesting overview!
@alexrayu Thanks
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.
@yvesmalouin You won’t get any argument from me on that. Media in Drupal really needs improvement.
You missed the numerous REST API improvements.
@kylebrowning Will users see those? That was focus of this list.
Great point! 😛
@kylebrowning Thanks. I do see your point though. A follow-up post on 8.2’s developer features would be a good idea.
Very cool 🙂