October 27, 2014

Drupal 8 is the most fully featured Drupal version ever. Site builders will notice this most immediately when looking at what is available out of the box. Drupal 8 is faster because features that are expected of a modern CMS, like a WYSIWYG editor, are in Core. It's cheaper because you don't have to pay for custom development to change administration listings since they are Views. And it's better because there are less "why does this not work" moments including the ability to place the same block in multiple regions. Below are four videos that demonstrate these new Drupal 8 features and a few more.

Create Custom Administration Experiences

In Drupal 8, Views is in Core and Admin pages are Views. This means that administrative screens can be easily customized out of the box. For example, you can quickly create a filter on the People admin screen.

  1. Add a new field to the user entity.
  2. Go to Views administration and edit the /admin/people View.
  3. Add the new field and expose it.
  4. Click the field and edit the filter to group it so that it shows a select box.

You will now be able to filter by the new field on the People screen.

Whilst making this video, I uncovered some bugs that are being tracked below:

In-Place Editing and WYSIWYG in Core

In Drupal 8, the WYSIWYG editor (with CK Editor) works out of the box. There is also a new quick edit button for in-place editing. Just click on the title to edit the field. This works for all custom fields that you add and you can preview your changes immediately.

Adding the same block twice to the same page

In Drupal 8, you can now add the same block to multiple regions. Just search for a block, place it in a region, then search for it again and place it in another region.

Additionally, the content block modules allows us to create a block and have it instantly become fully editable and configurable. This core functionality is similar to what you could achieve in Drupal 7 with the Bean module.

Importing and export configuration

In Drupal 8, you can export and import single pieces of configuration, or an entire site, making it easier to move configuration from one site to another.
  1. Create a new content type.
  2. Go to Configuration -> Configuration Management (the standard profile has the Configuration module enabled).
  3. Go to Single Import/Export.
  4. Choose to export the new content type.
  5. Go to your new site, do steps #2 and #3, then paste the configuration in to import the new content type.