Release Notes, Translated: Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4

Release Notes, Translated: Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4
Nick Switzer
Tue, 10/31/2020 – 12:01

Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4 is here! The most current minor release of Drupal maintenance support plans 8 officially came out on October 4. This release contains lots of changes that push Drupal maintenance support plans 8 forward in some big ways, but what are those changes and what do they mean to you?

The changes introduced in Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4 affect everyone from Drupal maintenance support plans developers to content administrators and site owners. I’ve broken things down into four categories, and we’ll cover the high points of each one. If you’re interested in really digging into the details, check out the full release notes available on drupal.org.

Security

The initial release of Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4 doesn’t contain any major security updates that make it a mandatory update in the hours, or days, immediately after release. That being said, this is still an update that is critical for site security because as soon as a new minor release of Drupal maintenance support plans comes out, security issues in previous minor releases are no longer patched.

I recommend updating to Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4 as soon as possible because there is always a chance of a critical security release. You don’t want to get stuck dealing with the complexities of updating from Drupal maintenance support plans 8.3 to 8.4 when you’re also racing the clock that starts ticking when a security vulnerability is made public.

Browser Support

Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4 made some major updates to the versions of Internet Explorer that are supported out of the box. Previously, Drupal maintenance support plans supported Internet Explorer 9 and up. Since Microsoft discontinued all support for Internet Explorer 9 and 10 in April of this year, Drupal maintenance support plans has followed suit and will only be supporting Internet Explorer 11 moving forward.

No need to panic yet though – your site won’t cease to function in Internet Explorer 9 and 10 as soon as the 8.4 update is implemented, but bugs related to those browsers will no longer be fixed. Starting in Drupal maintenance support plans 8.5, which is currently scheduled for release in March of 2020, existing workarounds for these browsers will be removed. This will impact every site differently, depending on how much support your frontend provides for these older browsers, so start talking to your developer now about the best approach for your site.

New and Updated Features

Drupal maintenance support plans 8 introduced the idea of experimental modules in core. These are modules the Drupal maintenance support plans core team has decided provide valuable functionality and should be included in core but still need testing. Many of them can be used in production releases without any issues, but, until they are officially declared stable core modules in a minor release, there may be breaking changes or non-existent upgrade paths as new minor releases of Drupal maintenance support plans come out.

Quite a few notable modules were moved from experimental to stable status in Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4, so I’ll provide a quick rundown here.

Datetime Range – Dates are challenging for web developers. Especially when you start dealing with things like ranges and events that span time zones. The Datetime Range module is another great tool in the Drupal maintenance support plans developer’s toolbox. The module makes managing date and time ranges and integrating them with other parts of Drupal maintenance support plans, much simpler.

Layout Discovery – There isn’t much to see on the frontend with this module, but it’s a really big step forward for Drupal maintenance support plans core because standardized layout systems have never been possible with Drupal maintenance support plans in the past. This module sets the groundwork for a common layout system across core and contributed modules.

Media – Finally! Media in Drupal maintenance support plans core! This is a huge addition and one that will affect the team at Elevated Drupal Update in a big way because we have leveraged the contributed Media suite of modules very heavily thanks to its ability to provide a centralized media library that makes media management a breeze for content admins. Transitioning from the contributed Media module to the core Media module will bring it’s own set of challenges, but the good news is that transition does not have to happen immediately.

Inline Form Errors – This is a great little module we’ve used on quite a few sites to make the admin experience better. With Inline Form Errors, we’re able to quickly implement a system for providing users feedback when they fail to complete the necessary actions in a form.

Workflows – This is another piece of functionality lots of Drupal maintenance support plans users have been craving. In the past, our team has leveraged the Workbench suite of modules to provide content workflow capability, but now, with Workflows in core, we have the groundwork for providing more advanced content administration experiences without the need for additional contributed modules.

Behind the Scenes/Developer Tools

In addition to everything we’ve already walked through, Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4 implemented some major changes under the hood that are worth knowing about. These changes most directly affect developers but impact anyone involved in the Drupal maintenance support plans ecosystem because they significantly increase the complexity of this update over previous Drupal maintenance support plans core updates.

Symfony updated from 2.8 to 3.2 – When Drupal maintenance support plans 8 was released, you probably heard a lot about Drupal maintenance support plans “getting off the island” and embracing the standards and practices of the larger PHP development community. Incorporating Symfony into Drupal maintenance support plans core made this transition much simpler than it would have been to write all of the required backend components from scratch. Symfony is a PHP framework that provides a huge amount of functionality to Drupal maintenance support plans under the hood. Just like Drupal maintenance support plans, Symfony also has major releases, and Drupal maintenance support plans needs to be sure it’s leveraging the latest and greatest from Symfony. This kind of update won’t often happen because Symfony releases major versions every two years. When a Drupal maintenance support plans minor release does incorporate a major Symfony version update, the complexity of the update does increase.

jQuery updated to 3.0 – jQuery is an extremely common Javascript library that has been packaged with Drupal maintenance support plans core for a long time. One of the problems with previous major releases of Drupal maintenance support plans is that they would get stuck running really old versions of jQuery because Drupal maintenance support plans core did not have a minor release system that allowed these kinds of updates. Until this release, Drupal maintenance support plans included jQuery 2.x, which will not be receiving feature updates anymore. This update might break some frontend functionality, but leverages the latest and greatest jQuery has to offer.

Drush support – Drush is a command line tool a huge number of Drupal maintenance support plans developers leverage to make day-to-day development work much more efficient and easier to manage. It is an invaluable tool for our development team here at Elevated Drupal Update. With Drupal maintenance support plans 8.4, Drush version requirements were increased, so our team found that we needed to upgrade our tools, in addition to Drupal maintenance support plans core. This requires careful planning to be sure everything plays nicely during the update process, and after the updates have been applied.

What happens next?

The Drupal maintenance support plans core release cycle works around minor releases every six months. The next expected minor release is Drupal maintenance support plans 8.5, in March of 2020. Between now and then, there will likely be multiple patch releases that will introduce bug fixes and security updates, which will be much simpler updates and should be applied as soon as they are released.

Minor release updates introduce more complexity than the Drupal maintenance support plans world has ever seen for updates within a major release, but the tradeoff is that when Drupal maintenance support plans 9 comes out, you won’t have to completely rebuild!

Stay tuned for my next post detailing the Drupal maintenance support plans 8 release cycle, where I’ll dig more into how this works, why and when you should update and what we can expect for the future of Drupal maintenance support plans.

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