After more than two years of work by the open source community, Drupal released Drupal 8.7.0 last month, an update to Drupal 8 they describe as a “leap forward.” The new version brings improvements to team efficiency and accessibility, as well as some new features.
Take a look below at some of the most noteworthy enhancements and changes.
LAYOUT BUILDER
Originally introduced as an experimental module in Drupal 8.5.0, the Layout Builder in Drupal 8.7.0 is a stable module ready for action. The module allows for a drag-and-drop editing experience, requiring no custom code or theming to layout pages.
The module was designed with extensible layout storage in mind, so that layouts can be created and saved for diverse use cases. Drupal Founder Dries Buytaert touted the Layout Builder stating, “Not only can this version support basic use cases, it also supports advanced use cases. These types of templated layouts and workflow updates are not available in competitors’ layout building tools.”
JSON:API
JSON:API is now included as part of the Drupal core, enabling Drupal entities like blog posts, users, tags, or comments, to become accessible via the API. The API is standards-compliant, and allows for data to be pulled by third-party applications, like JavaScript applications, digital kiosks, chatbots, voice assistants and more.
JSON:API is designed to “minimize both the number of requests and the amount of data transmitted between clients and servers.” Specifically within Drupal 8.7.0, the API can be used for “reading and modifying resources, interacting with relationships between resources, and filtering, sorting, and pagination of resource collections.”
Development of the JSON:API module began in May 2016, and its inclusion in the Drupal core furthers Drupal 8’s commitment to being an API-first platform.
CHANGES TO UMAMI
Drupal’s demo environment Umami was launched with Drupal 8.6.0. In 8.7.0 the demo profile is more accessible, and now includes a new welcome tour, Layout Builder integration, and multilingual features. A set of Spanish translations is now available within the demo environment, with more languages in development.
For an in depth description of the new features and changes in Drupal 8.7.0, head to the release notes here.
As always, come back to our blog for the latest Drupal news, upgrade information, and tutorials.