Drupal 8.1 and What It Means for Drupal’s Future
Today, Drupal 8.1 was officially released.
All the way back in 2014, we talked about the changes coming to Drupal and how the release cycle would allow for changes to be progressively added to Drupal.
At that time, it was estimated that a new version with new features could be released every 6 months. Keeping to that schedule for Drupal 8 has been problematic due to the size and scope of what they wanted to achieve, but they made it!
Last month, we took a look at the major new features in Drupal 8.1. Adoption of Drupal 8 is steady rather than stellar, because some key modules are still don’t have stable releases for Drupal 8, and because migration is still difficult. Hopefully both of those problems will start to be resolved with Drupal 8.1.
What does this mean for Drupal 6 and 7 users?
Drupal 8.1 has improved migration capabilties and users can expect that most sites can now be migrated to Drupal 8. However, some modules are still unavailable. Here’s an overview of the status of the top 100 modules.
What does this mean for Drupal 9?
Yes, we went there! What about Drupal 9?
Drupal 8’s staged release cycle plan appears to be working well. So, this absolutely reduces the urgency to start thinking abotu Drupal 9. Officially Drupal 9 is still planned to be released in roughly three years. However, I suspect that most developers are now focused on Drupal 8.2, which is is scheduled to be completed by October this year.
Drupal 8.1 now uses Composer
Drupal 8.1 uses Composer, a PHP tool designed to help manage dependencies. This is the first stable release to use Composer for packaging its third-party dependencies. If your site is installed from a Drupal git repository, you must now run: ” composer install ” to create the third-party vendor directory. There is no change for sites installed from packaged releases (from Drupal.org archives or normal Drush installation).
Some smaller changes in Drupal 8.1
- CKeditor now allows for native spell checking from your browser:
- Language options during install are now re-enabled. This was disabled because of some bugs, but those have now been patched.
- There’s a new interface for content revision logs:
