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Big brands, high traffic websites and immense customisations are a part of one of the best CMS in the market - Drupal. Catering to diverse requirements and versatilities with ease makes it stand apart from the others. Known for its rich set of features, Drupal CMS is a platform that constantly wants to improve itself by introducing better functionalities in the latest versions for an improved experience. The latest one - Drupal 8.5.0 comes packed with some interesting features and upgrades. This blog talks about these exciting features, updates for developers and more.

The BigPipe Module

Introduced as an experimental module in Drupal 8.1, the Big Pipe module became a part of the Drupal core in its next version, as a stable module. This module which provided an implementation of Facebook's BigPipe Strategy, is one of the first examples of Drupal's approach to shorter release cycles.

In Drupal 8.5.0, this has been made a part of the standard installation profile i.e it is available by default.

Stable Modules

There are a couple of other amazing modules which are stable in the latest update.

• Settings Tray Module:A part of an initiative which allows changing the most common configuration from the Drupal front-end. Which means that it allows content moderation tasks to be taken care of without having to leave the front-end of the website.
• Content Moderation Module:Defines the different content workflow states, allowing only website editors with required permissions to publish. The module allows you to define the state in which a particular content is placed. It can be a draft, published, unpublished or needs review. Also, you can define the user permissions that are required to move the content between these states.

Experimental Layout Builder

Drupal 8.5.0 sees the introduction of a new experimental layout builder module. Tearing through the myths of Drupal being a complex CMS, this layout builder is a perfect example of how things can get simpler when you use Drupal CMS. The module allows you to edit the layout on the actual page itself rather than having to do it with a separate form, thus simplifying the entire Drupal website design process. Also, there is an added feature that allows you to have a different layout on a per-page/item basis.

Media Module

Having worked over the efforts done on contributed Media Entity Module in Drupal 8.4, The Media API added into the core had its own set of user experience issues. Due to this,the module was hidden from the user interface. Thus there was no way a user could enable or disable the module. In Drupal 8.5, these issues have been taken care of and these modules are now an integral part of the system, ensuring that anybody with the access to module management page can now easily enable or disable the media modules.

PHP 7.2

The first version of Drupal to fully support PHP's latest version, Drupal is keeping up with the latest advancements and the array of advantages it holds. With new features and improved performance over 7.1, PHP 7.2 is now being recommended to use with Drupal 8. Also, since Symphony 3.2 does not receive security coverage anymore, Drupal 8.5.0 uses Symphony Components 3.4.5.

Drupal Migrations

A major milestone for Drupal, considering the number of contributors who have worked for over 4 years on closing issues related to the migrate system architecture, it has been rendered stable with the latest release. Additionally, upgrading monolingual sites is now an easy task with Drupal Migrate and Drupal Migrate UI modules becoming stable. Also, incremental migrations i.e working on the website while the content is still being added, is also supported in Drupal's latest version.