Drupal 8 - The finer version

Dries Buytaert, the man who is an excellent blogger, a young global leader at the World Economic Forum, the CTO of Acquia, and also the founder of Drupal CMS. That’s right! Drupal was born by Dries Buytaert in the Netherlands in 2001 as a bulletin board system. Bit by bit it grew and is now alive and kicking as an Open Source System. An open-source content management system and a development framework that is free and operates & optimizes not just websites but a viewer's experience. 

Websites bagging up issues like low ranking, not mobile-friendly, browser incompatibilities, slow loading time, and more are a downer for any company. These are noteworthy downfalls that can manipulate a company’s lead generation and revenue production. On November 19, 2015, Drupal creeped up to its 8th version that was an improved one with advanced features and bug fixes. There have been several major releases of Drupal over the years with Drupal 8 peculiarly having undergone architectural changes of innovation for a modern and more flexible codebase that bears new features, API additions, and an easy upgrade path. With over 200 features, improvements, and exemplary Drupal 8 performance, it has grown into being a robust CMS solution with caching improvements to control various other features without trading off on website speed. This powerful system is the collective work of over 3,000 contributors.

Drupal has become the world's leading digital experience platform and has evolved extensively over the years. With Drupal 8 came enhanced website accessibility, improved website loading speed, built-in configuration management, web services, views as modules, core multilingual modules, responsive images, quick edit module, several new field types, text editor, and new theme engine. These varied features come as possibilities that are configured for optimal performance. As to the rest, Drupal 8 also proposes various options to repress or enhance bandwidth requirements.

The potential and possibilities

That being said, there are several features, tools, and modules of Drupal 8 that invest in enhancing its overall performance. Lend me your attention to elaborate on this further.

1. When Drupal 8 came into being, along came a new PHP-based theme engine called Twig which is fast, flexible, and secure. This new theme engine is part of the Symfony2 framework and allows users to create functional and beautiful websites. Its templates are written in a syntax that is easy to use and is more secure.
2. Mobile-friendly - The themes laid out in Drupal 8 are responsive, adapts to different screen sizes, and has a "Back to site" button that once clicked takes the user back to the home page. The new admin toolbar of Drupal 8 also works well on all mobile devices.
3. HTML5 is now taken as the standard for writing web markup and is also employed in Drupal 8. It allows access to input fields like date, phone, e-mail, etc., as well increases functionality and compatibility of a website.
4. Drupal builds websites with an improved loading speed, which is essential for getting a good Google ranking, but that's not it. It's even more critical for focusing on giving the viewer an excellent digital experience and the company an increasing revenue. To reach your marketing goals, you need to stress on the results of those Google rankings i.e. greater customer satisfaction, more conversions, and higher sales. Also, if navigation of a website is quick, users tend to see more pages of a website and understand the company’s products and services better.
5. Multilingual Websites - Multilingualism on the web delivers a better user experience to broader audiences. Drupal 8's sturdy multilingual features with an admin interface has built-in content translation in over 90 languages. 
6. Image Optimization - As per the recent statistics, customers close the website if it takes more than 3 seconds in loading. In consideration of the foregoing, images are compressed without compromising on quality, then are uploaded in the right size using Drupal's Image Optimization API to drop-off a website's load time. 
7. Configuration - Drupal has improved its built-in configuration management by adding configuration elements like views, fields, content type, etc to its improved version - Drupal 8. The configuration settings in this version are stored in files and not site databases so that the settings can be moved between development and live sites. Taking that into account, there exists a version-control system to track configuration changes.
8. Easy Authoring and Editing - CKEditor is the WYSIWYG open-source editor installed in Drupal 8. It's default installation has a lot of options along with additional features that come with Drupal’s modules. This editor provides users the access to make changes to the website and its content. The content displayed on the website can also be edited and added from the front-end.
9. Built-in Web services - Web services either extract data from Drupal 8 that's acting as a data source or they bring data to it from the front end. They provide the websites and applications a common language that is understandable by all, like XML, HAL+JSON, Json, etc. by creating an API on the site that others can connect to by your permission, and share data.
10. Drupal 8 offers undivided support to industry standard accessibility technologies such as WAI-ARIA (Web accessibility Initiative - Accessible rich internet applications). WAI-ARIA makes web content and applications more approachable to people with disabilities. ARIA Live Announcements API and TabManager provide control for rich internet applications and thus are considered substantial improvements in Drupal 8's version. Dynamic page caching, automated testing, multilingual modules, Drupal online security, modal dialogs, better font sizes and a tonne of other features make Drupal 8 core a powerful CMS version.
11. Drupal 8’s wealth of field types and performance modules make it really uncomplicated and smooth to manage a website and the content structure. Also, complex fields are added to a content by using modules types like Color field, Double field, Taxonomy container, Address, Advanced text formatter, link, date, etc. or combinations of them to brush it up. The updated version also gives the users an option to create their own custom field type.
12. Drupal 8's coding standards run parallel with the PHP 7 standards, use external libraries like Guzzle, Composer, PHPUnit, etc. and boasts a modern and result-oriented code by Symfony2.
13. Javascript Automated testing makes automatic testing possible for Drupal 8.1's front-end which has multiple testing framework types like Unit tests, Kernel tests, Functional tests (Integration tests), and Browser-based testing, each having individual purposes and complexity to write a successful test. The testing saves time and makes continuous integration easier.
14. BigPipe module - The BigPipe technique was invented at Facebook which was included in Drupal 8 core. It was then improved with time from 8.1 to 8.2 (beta) to now 8.3, the most stable of all. The BigPipe part feature of Drupal 8 lets developers optimize a website's loading performance for the users.

You may also read: WordPress Vs Drupal: Which is the Right CMS for Website

Drupal 8.0 overhauling the rest

After considering all the points, it eventually comes down to attracting the audience to your website and making them stay. The D8 series or Drupal 8 series comes with - routing that is used by the Drupal web development companies to develop more SEO friendly URLs, Symphony framework that relies on the OOPs (Object-Oriented Programming) concept to make Drupal 8 stronger, the numerous secure and stout application development, and so much more. It provides the users with perks like encapsulation [wrapping the data (variables) and code used on the data (methods) together as a single entity] and code reuse to maintain and structure code in a better way.

Penyaskito, a Drupal contributor quoted “Thanks to the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, translation is not an afterthought in Core anymore. And thanks to the clean APIs that were designed with this in mind, we are able to improve every day the functionalities for our clients in our integration with Drupal 8." 

The pros of this platform should be profoundly considered when choosing a CMS. Evon Technologies, a Drupal web development company in India fits the criteria of employing zealous Drupal developers that use the fantastic Drupal 8.0 to make the life for developers, content authors and site builders easier. To make appealing websites that effortlessly deliver content to different devices and channels. And…. to keep clients satisfied and customers happy. To know more get in touch with us or email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.