Every six months, there comes a fresh Drupal 8 minor release full of lucrative features — it’s the essence of Drupal 8’s continuous innovation policy. And another big day has come! Drupal 8.4.0 is out on October 4, making this autumn especially rich in gifts. Just two weeks after the appearance of Drupal Commerce 2.0 for Drupal 8 online stores, Drupal 8.4.0 takes its turn in the spotlight. Let’s see why.
The benefits of the newly released Drupal 8.4.0
Drupal 8.4.0 brings us noticeable enhancements in content editing, media handling, workflows, website administration, configuration management, migrations, third-party integration, performance and scalability, developer experiences, automated testing, and more. We go into the details below.
Easy updates and Drupal 8.4’s friendliness to predecessors
The idea of backwards compatibility with previous versions for easy upgrades is receiving a lot of attention in Drupal 8. Of course, Drupal 8.4 is backwards compatible with Drupal 8.3. This includes all public APIs, while internal APIs may require special attention.
Generally, updating between 8.3 and 8.4 should be as easy as updating between, say, 8.3.2 to 8.3.3. Websites should make this update, and enjoy all the improvements that come with!
New modules and Drupal 8.4’s love for experiments
According to Drupal 8’s policy, every minor release has a host of new and interesting core modules, which start out experimental and then reach stability. Drupal 8.4’s experiments have been incredibly lucky!
So let us introduce the team of newcomers to core. Originally experimental, these useful modules have become stable in Drupal 8.4:
Inline Form Errors
Users will easily learn about some entry errors thanks to the module that provides their summary at the top of the form. It also gives individual error messages for form elements. It’s all available to screen readers, which is a great web accessibility improvement.
Media
The Media module greatly assists the whole ecosystem of contributed modules based on Media Entity by offering an API for reusable media entities.
Datetime Range
The Datetime Range module allows you to provide an end date in contributed modules such as Calendar and the like.
Layout Discovery
The Layout Discovery module offers an API that provides compatibility between core and contributed layout solutions. It lets modules and themes register layouts.
Workflows
The Workflows module gives us a system of states that show progress (Draft, Archived, and Published). This is useful both for publishing and non-publishing workflows.
These modules are on the point of becoming stable:
Content Moderation
The Content Moderation module offers efficient ways of applying the Workflows module’s capabilities to content.
Settings Tray
This module improves the theming experiences by letting you configure blocks, menus and other elements from the frontend.
Place Blocks
Thanks to the Place Blocks module, you will be able to place a block on any page and immediately see where it is displayed on your website, without the help of your administration form.
Field Layout
The Field Layout module offers special opportunities in rearranging fields.
Migrate, Migrate Drupal, and Migrate Drupal UI
This “team” is responsible for providing a general migration API, migration support, and a handy user interface for migrations.
Drupal 8.4’s support for everything new
New Symfony, jQuery, and jQuery UI
Let’s take the best from Symfony and jQuery! The Drupal 8.4.x improvements, including the updates of Symfony to version 3.2, jQuery to version 3, and jQuery UI to version 1.12, are very helpful
Updating Drush
For working effectively with Drupal 8.4.x, you will need to update your Drush to 8.1.12 before you start using it.
No old browsers
Beginning with Drupal 8.4.x, there is no support for Internet Explorer 9 and 10. It will still be displayed on them, but no bug fixes will be made. Support will be removed totally in Drupal 8.5.x.
Wrap-up
This is just a glimpse at Drupal 8.4 improvements. If you need help updating your site to 8.4.0, or if you are considering an upgrade to Drupal 8 from Drupal 7 or 6, our Drupal developers are always here for you.