Drupal consultant
What are the core skills, tools and practices you will need to be Drupal 8 ready? How do you get them now? This summary is a companion to PreviousNext's DrupalCon presentation "Drupal 8 Ready".
Instead of using RDF mappings from a range of vocabularies (Dublin Core, FoaF, SIOC etc), Drupal 8 uses mappings solely from Schema.org.
For example, where title was “dublincore:title” in Drupal 7, it is now “schema:name”.
Nobody can understand RDF, and even Drupals relatively simple namespaces confused people. Schema.org has adoption from major search engines, and is emerging as an agreed standard for identifiying common types of objects.
Drupal still has lots of issues with RDFa in general, and RDFa output still needs work.
Using the new Rest & Serialization APIs, you will be able to output serialized data as JSON and XML from Drupal, almost as easily as you can normal HTML output. The REST module uses the Drupal 8 plugin API to allow the definition of arbitrary resources, while it also provides a default entity plugin to expose nodes, users, taxonomy terms or any other available entity type on a web service interface.
A great deal of what we do online is now down through apps or other services which access data held in other places. While it is possible to do some of this stuff in 7, being able to do it natively adds a whole new powerful set of tools to the Drupal site arsenal.
Blocks are finally Entities, and come with all those things Entities give you, including fields, revisions and so on. They are also properly reusable, for the first time.
Block module has been around for a very long time. Its one of the oldest parts of Drupal, it was there in Drupal 1. Perhaps for this reason, it’s never really been given the love and attention it deserves. The Block placement UI hardly changed between Drupal 3 and 7. Well, now its finally getting some.
This is a set of changes bringing a much smoother editing experience to Drupal. Along with helping push in WYSIWYG in core for 8, Spark has integrated the Aloha in-place editor and made other improvements, including better text formats.
Out-of-the-box editing capability in Drupal 7 is lackluster at best. With CKEditor and Aloha in core, there’s finally a standardised way of providing a seamless editing experience for content authors.
The new Tour module provides a context-sensitive guided tour of the main parts of any given Drupal user interface.
It is powered by the JQuery Joyride plugin and allows site builders and module-developers the ability to provide targeted help for specific elements on a page.
Drupal 8 introduces some major changes to the way configuration is managed. A lot of configuration has been removed from the database and stored in YAML files. Configuration can be imported and exported removing the need for some contributed modules such as Features (depending on your site and how it is developed).
Having configuration in files removes a lot of the dependence on the database. This means less database overhead. Other benefits include: the ability to manage configuration through version control, as well as the ability to easily deploy configuration between environments.
Need to know
One of the principle limitations with sharing content from Drupal sites has always been the the principle identifier for any entity is a simple numeric identifier which is unique ONLY to the site it comes from.
UUIDs are a universally unique identifier for content, and have been adopted extensively in Drupal 8, ensuring that content created on different sites can be mixed safely.