At present,Drupal is one of the in-demand open source content management systems.The themes,plug-ins and configuration options provided by Drupal make it easier for users to create and manage a variety of website content efficiently. Also, Drupal simplifies web application development by supporting a variety of content, content categorization, and advanced user management.
Despite being open source, Drupal has been updated by the community consistently. Each new version of the content management system comes with several new features to simplify web application development and web content management. The users can switch to Drupal 8.3 to avail a myriad of new features and enhancements.
Overview of New Features Included in Drupal 8.3
Redesigned Workflows
Drupal 8.2 came with a new experimental module called Workflows. The users can take advantage of Workflows to accelerate content management and approval process. Drupal 8.3 comes with improved Workflows with a redesigned user interface (UI). The redesigned user interface enables users to see the whole workflow on a single screen. The users also have option to create custom publishing states and control the transition between different publishing states. The feature will help enterprise to manage website content more efficiently by deploying multiple content writers and editors.
New Experimental Modules
The latest version of Drupal further comes with several new experimental modules – Field Layout and Layout Discovery. The developers can use the Field Layout module to rearrange the fields of a form based on content or block types. Likewise, they can use the Layout Discovery module to enhance compatibility between core and contributed layout solutions. The API provided by the experimental modules further makes it easier for developers to register new layouts, in addition to availing five common default layouts.
A Stable BigPipe Module
As a dynamic web page serving system, BigPipe helps programmers to improve the performance of web applications significantly by dividing a web page into small chunks. Also, it pipelines the small chunks or pagelets through various execution stages in the browse and web server. Drupal 8.3 implements the dynamic web page serving system introduced by Facebook concretely. The developers can use the stable BigPipe module to render dynamic, personalized, or uncatchable content more efficiently.
Improved Content Authoring Feature
Drupal 8.3 comes with CKEditor 4.6. The updated version of CKEditor accelerate content authoring process by providing several new features – option to paste content from Word more efficiently and a new default skin that perfectly complements the administrative themes provided by the CMS. At the same time, the content authors can use the AutoGrow plug-in to customize content easily for larger screen sizes.
Improved Site Building and Administrative Features
The redesigned admin status report feature included in Drupal 8.3 sends status messages for the website consistently. The status messages will make it easier for site administrators to identify and resolve the issues affecting the website’s user experience. Drupal 8.3 also comes with a standardized views listing page and rearranged Views filters. Also, the images field accepts only images and does not show the confusing video upload option to mobile users.
Extended Web Services Support
Drupal 8.3 comes with new features, bug fixes, and improved responses to support web services more extensively. The site administrators now have option to register users through the REST API. Also, Drupal has enhanced the performance of the anonymous REST API significantly by implementing internal page cache. The Drupal developers can now use the REST API to enhance test coverage. Likewise, they can check the 403 responses to identify why access was denied to the web services.
On the whole, Drupal 8.3 comes with a myriad of new features despite being a minor release. Also, it will continue to receive bug and security fixes at regular intervals. But the users have to keep in mind the minor changes made to the modules, themes, and translations while updating their sites to Drupal 8.3. Also, they need to test the update in production environment after updating to the most recent version of Drupal.
