Greetings to everyone! It looks like “8” is a lucky number, and 8/2017 is a lucky month for Drupal developers. By taking a little extra energy from the sun (which is pretty environmentally friendly), the Drupal community has made so many awesome things! It feels like yesterday that we offered you the July 2017 Drupal news summary, and now we’re moving on to the wrap-up of the hot and productive August 2017.
What’s new with Drupal in August 2017
New releases of some Drupal modules
A hot month with hot releases! It’s a true embarrassment of choices. Let’s have a little “tasting session” and appreciate at least a couple of examples:
- The new version of Drupal developers’ favorite assistant, Devel 8.x-1.0, has rolled out with plenty of fanfare. It features Drush 8 and Drush 9 support, new Twig extensions for debugging, and much more.
- Especially those interested in headless (or decoupled) Drupal projects, will be happy to see the GraphQL module in its new and improved 8.x-3.0-alpha5 version.
- Providing meta tags for your website has become more convenient due to the Metatag 8.x-1.2 version. It features bug fixes and initial JSON support.
- What about building attractive web forms? It’s a breeze with the entirely new code base of Webform 8.x-5.x. Here goes its beta16 release with lots of updates.
- Clear external caching systems in accordance with Drupal 8’s new cache architecture. For this purpose, you have a new and improved Purge 8.x-3.0-beta8.
- The Workbench, a whole suite of modules to make content management processes more convenient, has introduced its new release in August — 8.x-1.0.
- Websites now “socialize” even better thanks to the Social API’s 8.x-1.1 release. This module is part of the Drupal Social Initiative, and is now compatible with Social Auth 1.x.
- You will appreciate working with local and external libraries using the Bootstrap Library 8.x-1.9 release that has Bootstrap 4 beta version added in August.
- Running Cron jobs is now easier both in Drupal 7 (due to the option to disable the execution of scheduled jobs in 7.x-2.5) and in Drupal 8 (due to numerous bug fixes in 8.x-2.0-alpha2).
Drupal security fixes for your good night’s sleep
Drupal is a solid fortress, whose guards are always on the look-out. The Drupal Security Team has “caught” a number of security vulnerabilities (ranging from moderately critical to critical) and made fixes to them.
- Learn what it means for Drupal 8 and update your Drupal 8 core to 8.3.7.
- Learn what it means for Drupal 7 and update your contributed Views module (if you are one of its almost 900,000 users).
The long-expected Drupal 8.4: alpha becomes beta
We are steadily moving towards Drupal 8.4. The previous step was Drupal 8.4.0 alpha1, and now August brings us Drupal 8.4.0-beta1. Hopefully, these steps will finally lead us to the stable 8.4 release in October!
Summer, bye till next year! Internet Explorer 9 and 10, bye forever!
August 2017 was time to say goodbye to Internet Explorer 9 and 10. Beginning with version 8.4, Drupal stopped official support for them, so no public bug reports will be received by the security team. Hopefully you’re not upset? ;)
Drupal should know its heroes
To be a Drupal hero, no one needs a Superman cape. There are so many awesome drupalers who help develop Drupal in various ways every day! And the Drupal Association is re-launching a program to highlight these real Drupal heroes. Wanna join the special committee on this? The Association welcomes you!
The wrap-up of the wrap-up
Here is our August 2017 Drupal news summary. Is there anyone regretting the end of summer? If you are, there’s no need to be blue — every drupaler know that the autumn’s gonna be rocking! Take the best from what Drupal offers, enjoy new features or an entirely new website, and know you can always rely on our expert Drupal company.