Photography by Tim Miller
In the second part of his keynote address at Drupalcon Sydney 2013, Dries spoke mainly about what to expect from Drupal 8.
While the release date for Drupal 8 has been set for September 2013, Dries explained that Drupal 8 will focus on three core audiences: developers, site visitors and authors.
The three key things to look forward to in the next major version of Drupal are:
- Web services
Symfony a PHP based, object oriented application framework, be part of Drupal core. One of the main reasons to add Symfony is to improve web services.
This would help integration with third party services. For example, with the addition of Symfony it will be easier to integrate third party services such as Salesforce. Similarly it will be easy to communicate with native apps for Android or iOS. Integration with front end frameworks will also make it easier for Drupal to Drupal communication.
- Authoring experience
The second important change will be in Authoring experience. It include the following.
Mobile improvement: There will be huge input going to provide better experience in Mobile segment.
In place editing: This will provide easier editing.
WYSIWYG: Drupal 8 is also going to come with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get).
Redesign content creation page: This will offer a better and more efficient experience. - Site builder improvement
There is going to be many improvements in this area in Drupal8. Some of these are listed below:
- Configuration:
One of the challenges in Drupal 7 is that there is no separation between content and configuration.
There are challenges when there is a staging environment and pushing to production environment and developers do change in development environment.
Drupal 8 will help to make deployment easier.
Development environment, production environment, staging environment, live environment etc will be handle better in Drupal8. - ‘View’ will be added to the core
There was loud applause from the audience as Dries said this. A lot of work has been done in this area.
- Multilingual improvements
This is another area, which will witness big improvements in Drupal 8.
As a matter of fact, Dries added that there are so many things happening in Drupal 8 and there isn’t enough time to talk about all of it in the Keynote.
He summarised saying that almost 1,000 contributors working on 4700 patches is truly great.
Thus Drupal 8 seems to be all set to take us to next level when it is released in the next few months.
But the bigger question is, is that enough?
Please stay tuned for what he said about Beyond Drupal 8 in my next blog.
Photography by Tim Miller
