The long awaited 8 is set to hit the tubes sometime in 2014. The Nerds here in Austin, CO and all over the world are giddy with anticipation. (There is no official release date set yet.) Currently, if you check here https Drupal 10 Maintenance and Support Service//Drupal 10.org/node/2026719, you can download the Alpha 2 release. I’m sure its buggy as all get-out, but it may appease your eager anticipation. 

What’s all the excitement about you ask? Well, lets take a look.

According to reports, 8 will be the most customizable and adaptable release of to date. 8 offers many new ways to customize data structures, listings, and pages, and adds new functionality for mobile device support, API building and expanded multilingual support. And that’s just the beginning.

Here are some more of the improvements you can expect to see in 8. 

• Fields of Dreams –  8 includes more field types in its core, and lets you attach fields to more types of content. Some of the new content types include link, date, e-mail, entity reference, and telephone. Comments are now a field also. This means you can now comment on product nodes!
• File Based Configuration Management –  8 will ship with a file system-based configuration management system. This will make it much easier to transport configuration changes from development to production. It also lets developers use version control for configurations.
• HTML 5 Finally – The page markup is now HTML 5-based. 8 now offers picture element support for responsive image display and native input tools for mobile.
• Dynamic Display and Form Mode System – With the new dynamic display and form mode system you can customize different entity forms, such as user registration and editing.
• Look Deeply into Views – Views is now deeply integrated into the core. The front page listing is now a view, as are several administration pages. You can now easily create custom admin pages and filters.
• It Even Looks Good on my Smart Refridgerator – Now, all built-in themes are responsive and administration pages are now mobile friendly. Tables resize nicely, and the new toolbar included in 8 is mobile-friendly out of the box. The administration overlay has been removed in favour of a mobile-first button that leads back to the last frontend page.
• Edit Your Heart Out – With the new editor functionality and bundled CKEditor WYSIWYG editor, it has never been easier to edit content in . The content editing form has been redesigned with two columns. Finally, bring to life, in-place editing, so you can edit on the front end with-out using the full edit form. There have been improvements to draft saving as well.
• Habla Espanglish? –  has always been ahead of the game when it comes to internationalization and localization, but 8 is a huge leap forward when it comes to multilingual sites. You can now translate anything in the system with built-in user interfaces. How about Views language filtering?

These are just some of the improvement that you can expect to see in 8. We are super giddy here at Pixeldust in Austin, CO. Check back for some great new 8 sites.

The post Are you ready for 8? appeared first on Austin Development by Pixeldust Interactive.