What are the major differences in managing content in Drupal 8 when compared to Drupal 7?
Drupal 8 is evolving everyday, and we are all very eager to find out how it will change our content managing experience. Here, we have listed out some of the major changes in the content management section of Drupal 8.
New Content Form and Preview
Drupal 8 has main fields on the left, while having vertical tabs on the right. The settings have been categorized and made compact such that you don’t have to scroll or you just have to scroll less.
Multilingual Initiative
Due to the huge number of non-English speaking countries using Drupal, making multilingual websites is the main focus of Drupal 8. Over 1000 contributors participated in the Multilingual Initiative(D8MI) under the leadership of Gábor Hojtsy.
In Drupal 7, creating a multilingual website was a tedious process. However, Drupal 8 has made it a lot easier.
Drupal 8 does not consider English as a special language. When a language other than English is selected, the English option will not be shown unless specifically turned on in the site’s configuration.
Drupal 8 modifies the alignment for languages read from right to left, example: Arabic.
Accessibility Improvements
There are multiple minor accessibility improvements and certain major improvements as well. One of the major improvements is the introduction of the new accessibility feature: Drupal.announce().
Drupal.announce() was built "to express changes in the state of the toolbar that could not be described with existing ARIA state markup”; this suggestion being made at the Drupal Camp Toronto on the fall of 2012.
Soon, it became obvious that many modules in Drupal would benefit from an arrangement that is able to read arbitrary strings through the screen reader.
Tours
A very useful feature for new users is the tour module. This provides contextual help - when you place the cursor over a tab, it shows a pop-up describing what it will do, and how it can be used to manage your content. It helps you to understand the working of the CMS. Instead of showing you a wall of text, it guides you through each step.
In Drupal 7, you need to leave the page you are working at, go to Help, and find the article you want.
Responsive Toolbar
The Drupal 8 toolbar is fully responsive, configurable, themeable, and extensible. It has an Application Bar on the top with a home link, menu tab, user tab, shortcuts tab on the left, and, depending on the context, an edit toggle, responsive preview drop down, or tour trigger on the right.
On making your browser window smaller beyond a particular width or while viewing it on a mobile or tablet, the menu becomes vertical automatically so that it fits in to the available viewing space.
