Over the years, Drupal has become one of the most powerful open source CMS's and the standard choice for thousands of large web projects. It offers up-to-date digital solutions and is backed by the active community members and teams of seasoned Drupal developers all over the globe. Such popularity is justified by its flexibility, scalability and high security. The latest version of Drupal is proof of how far it has come. Drupal 8 comes with more than 200 new enhancements and great features to meet your business goals. Whether you run a government website or a commercial one, a closer look at the main benefits of Drupal 8 is worth your valuable time.
Benefits of Drupal 8
Mobile capabilities
Recent trends show that the browsing experience through some sort of mobile device is increasing exponentially. Drupal 8 puts mobile users at it’s core and is built for mobile first and PC second. It includes a new, fully mobile administrative toolbar with responsive themes. This is extremely helpful for editors to quickly create and edit content, easily make any other changes to it from any mobile device and build APIs that can be used for mobile apps. You can apply all this by using a handy, purpose-built interface on a small screen. The result is a responsive and suitable for any device design.
Multilingual features
Translation was never as easy as it is now. Businesses with a target global audience can benefit from Drupal multilingual capabilities. The translation systems of Drupal 8 have been completely rewritten and are fully integrated into the CMS making it possible to install it in one of 100 languages right out of the box.
The latest version is configured with powerful translation module with content translation, interface translation and configuration translation to provide excellent experience across multiple devices. You can easily translate any component of the software (taxonomy, comments, image styles, and more) and even get software translation updates from the community. It saves a large amount of time and money.
Well-defined configuration management
In Drupal 8, it has a new, useful “Export Configuration” function that helps you export either the full site configuration or a single configuration file. The whole configuration is presented in the form of text files in the YAML format. There is no longer a need to use additional modules (e.g. the Features module) to deploy a configuration from one environment to another.
Built-in web services
Drupal 8 makes things easier than ever for mobile app developers. Businesses can build high-quality mobile apps by using Drupal 8 as the data source. Furthermore, backend developers are able to leverage Hypertext Application Language (HAL), provide your content in the format of JSON or XML, display views-generated lists as services, and much more.
Content authoring
It is important to note new improvements and features for content authoring in Drupal 8. If you are in charge of creating or editing content, you can sigh with relief as editing is easier than ever before. The first thing that attracts your attention is a comfy content creation page, which consists of two columns, one for content fields and the second for optional settings.
A new interface uses an essential tool for content creation and publishing — WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) editor. This new in-place feature gives you the ability to edit the content on the front end. It means that you can take a look at the web page as visitors see it and improve it before your site goes live, so that your viewers will always get the best possible experience.
Fast theming
Designing beautiful websites with beautiful themes is becoming much easier. Drupal 8 has one more powerful tool called Twig, a template engine which replaces Drupal's default PHP Template engine. Being a part of the Symfony2 framework, Twig provides a greater separation between logic and display (PHP code is no longer embedded in templates). It is fast, flexible and secure.
Better mark up
We’ve already mentioned the importance of mobile-friendliness in the web wide world. With the latest technology, such as HTML5, you can improve form fields and structural mark-up both on mobile and desktop and make your website cleaner and flexible. Moreover, Drupal 8 will now support built-in audio and video playback on websites.
Performance improvements
With Drupal 8, website speed optimization is easy to do as well (by minimizing HTTP requests, minifying HTML, CSS and Javascript, using CDN, and more). D8 now has efficient page caching with a new cache system called cache tags that is enabled by default. It helps ensure a rewarding browsing experience. Rather than loading the same content over and over again, it can be loaded from your cache instead.
Conclusion
Considering the benefits of Drupal 8 given above, you are now sure that migrating your website to the latest version is the smartest decision. It can significantly improve your efficiency in achieving your business goals.
Are you not using Drupal 8 yet? Let our software development agency remedy the situation and easy upgrade your website.
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