What’s New in Drupal 8.6?

The list of new features is quite a long one, but we’ll specifically take a look at them from the perspective of media management, which is the most important for our clients.

In addition to the new media management, the following features were added:

• installation by a single command and improved demo – these functions are important for technically-oriented people who are the ones to decide about the right technical solution. Up to this point, it was quite difficult to install Drupal and play around with it, because you had to secure a web server, a database server and the suitable PHP version with all the necessary extensions installed. There were other ways around it, though. One of them being cloud services like simpletest.me, for example. The downside of this was that, in most cases, the results disappeared after 24 hours. With the introduction of Drupal 8.6, all you need is PHP7 and one command – everything else will be done by the system on its own. This new system uses SQLite database server, which means that it’s only suitable for testing.
   
• new experimental module Workspaces – the interesting thing about it is that it was one of the most demanded functionalities based on a client survey and its UX was done by Jojo Tóth. This functionality is an extension of Content Moderation designed for more demanding clients. A typical example of this functionality is a publisher website that wants to publish new content as soon as possible, let’s say after a football match finishes. Workspaces allows them to create unpublished copies of the entire website with different versions of articles and immediately publish the appropriate version after the match is over. Moreover, it offers merging of existing changes from the live website. Solving of conflicts in Git style should come later releases of Drupal.
  
   

• marking monolingual migrations from Drupal 6 and 7 as stable and transferring multilingual migrations to separate experimental module
   

In the following release of Drupal 8 coming in March 2019, the following functions are expected:

• end of the official support for PHP5 – this step is necessary because numerous Drupal dependencies have already dropped its support, which means that currently not the latest versions are being used. This should not be a problem for most of the clients as hosting providers support PHP7. 
   
• support of API platforms – this could mean adding a JSON-API module to the core of Drupal. The addition of GraphQL to the core remains questionable.
   
• better support for Composer
   
• stabilization of multilingual migrations