On September 6th the Drupal team shipped Drupal 8.6.0, a huge update to the Drupal project. Packed with powerful features shipped with Drupal, the release is a significant one for content editors, site builders, developers and evaluators.
With a rapid year-on-year adoption of Drupal 8, the release is set to be the leading choice for many big organisations. Known for constantly improving itself with every release, the features of Drupal 8.6.0 are quite interesting.
The new features of Drupal 8.6.0
As mentioned, Drupal 8.6.0 ships with a lot of new features out of the box which will help business leaders to showcase the potential of Drupal as a platform. The notable features added in Drupal 8.6.0 are:
Media library for Ease access to Media
One of the major features of Drupal 8.6.0, this addresses the media support provided by Drupal. While Drupal had basic files & image support, it was still far behind from what a modern web system should ideally support out of the box, for media handling. The media initiative was taken to include a rich media support system which enabled the content editors to reuse the existing media, and also have more control and meta information of the site media. In the latest version of Drupal, the rich media library is added which not only provides a quick access to the existing media entities, but also uploads new media entities out of the box.
Apart from this, a more significant improvement was the ability to add remote media types. Now content editors can easily embed YouTube or Vimeo videos into the content. This approach makes it very easy to add videos from a remote source to your content with ease. Drupal in its latest release will also provide a library for the remote media type, to easily attach a media in your content.
New Experimental Workspace Module
Drupal at its core, is a Content Management System which is all about managing your content. The experimental workspace module will change the way content authors and site maintainers work and review their content before publishing it to the end users. This will enable the creation of environments like Staging and Production, allowing content to move from one environment to another with ease. The approach will drastically relax the tiresome effort of reviewing the content, and editors can have a full site preview of how the site appears once the content gets published.
Improvements in the Layout Builder
As a site builder, it is really important to create pages of different layouts quick and with ease. In Drupal 7, this was done by contributed modules like Panelizer & Display Suite. But now, Drupal 8 has this capability in its core. Using the Layout Discovery module, site builders can easily create new layouts which will be used by Layout Builder module to build beautiful landing pages.
Quick Installation of Drupal
One of the biggest problem for evaluators was setting up a new Drupal site which was quite a task. In this modern and fast paced world, evaluators and first time users would like to quickly set a fresh Drupal instance and review it. To tackle this issue, a new “quick-start” command was added in Drupal 8.6.0 , with only one dependency i.e PHP, enabling a new user to quickly launch a new Drupal site from scratch without the need of setting up a webserver and database.
Umami Demo environment
Apart from the “quick-start” command to launch a fresh Drupal site, the team has worked relentlessly to build a demo profile for the evaluator. The Umami demonstration will quickly exhibit the powerful features of Drupal 8 like data modelling, content listing, blocks and content moderation. This will not only help a new user to come onboard, but also help the service providers to demo, thus harnessing the capabilities of Drupal to potential customers.
Drupal has been evolving rapidly and bringing in a lot of modern functionalities which are out of the box while improving the usability and robustness of the system. The features of Drupal 8.6.0 bring something new for each user, whether you are a content editor or a developer. With releases like this, it proves the potential and the enthusiasm of the contributors to make Drupal a better product with every release.
