Drupal 8 is the latest release of the popular Drupal Content Management System (CMS), developed and supported by a global community of over one million people.

Drupal is free and Open Source software, allowing use and modification without license fees or hidden charges. At Upbeat we have worked with Drupal since version 4.x and welcomed the following recent additions that have made Drupal 8 more powerful and easier to use than ever.

Easier, faster and more precise content updates.

Rather than using the CMS interface to make changes, you can now browse your site as a user would and when you see something that needs changing, you can just click “edit” to change it. This brings up a popup WYSIWYG editor screen.

Text wrapping and alignment of content on the page is now clearly visible as you type - you can see how it actually looks, without needing to flick between the website and CMS.

Responsive administration screens.

Now both faces of Drupal (the website and the CMS) are responsive, so the experience of editing your site on mobile devices is made easier.

The core of Drupal 8 is also centred around responsive design, making design implementation a more efficient exercise. Breakpoint functionality is built into the core, allowing the creation of pages for different device resolutions.

Responsive images can be handled within the CMS, along with breakpoints allowing the creation of responsive layouts and easy responsive content creation.

Better connected to other platforms and systems.

It’s now easier to get information in and out of Drupal 8 and to synchronise it with other systems.

REST is a standardised communication method for web systems, helping to make Drupal more mainstream. This means that getting your website platform to talk to a CRM written in a completely different programming language is suddenly much easier, making integration projects less expensive and less risky. 

Better for SEO, and search traffic acquisition.

In Drupal 8 your content types make sense to Search Engines, and may display more prominently in search results because of this.

Multilingual as standard, for now and in the future.

Drupal 8 can support your multilingual site now, or whenever this becomes a requirement in the future. Drupal 8 Installs in 94 native languages and assign languages to everything, even content blocks. The interface is also specifically designed for content translation workflows.

Built so that everyone understands it.

OOP is a more modular approach to development, allowing for easier maintenance and scaling.

Using many core components of Symfony (a PHP framework) also opens up Drupal to a wider range of PHP programmers, which reduces the need to be a ‘Drupal specialist’, making it more mainstream.

In other words, they benefit end users of the platform due to the increased adoption of Drupal 8 among programmers. The increased size of the community behind the platform also means it can evolve faster and see new features released more frequently. 

If you have Drupal 7, the time to upgrade to Drupal 8 is now!

Let's talk about your project

Let us advise you when it’s time to upgrade to Drupal 8. We can also help if you want to start a completely new project built in Drupal 8. Get in touch and we can talk about what's best for you.