Keeping up with the promises made during earlier announcements, Drupal released the 8.6 version on September 5. The update comes with significant additions.
Drupal 8.6 now supports MySQL 8. Also, with this update a monolingual Drupal 6 site can be migrated to Drupal 8 directly from the user interface. Multilingual website migration using the UI is still under development. Apart from these changes, other important changes are listed below.
Easier Drupal installations
Installations on Drupal have been made easier. There are two ways to install Drupal.
- A quick start command installs Drupal within 2 minutes using PHP’s built in web server and SQlite database.
- Drupal’s installer now recognizes existing configurations and provides an option to install updates for that configuration.
Test environment to showcase features
Image source: drupal.org
Drupal now provides an easy-to-install test environment in a demo website called umami. The demo profile can be used to showcase Drupal’s data modeling, listing, page composition, and content moderation capabilities to prospects. It will also help in onboarding new users.
Support for remote media types
Image source: drupal.org
This Drupal update adds support for remote media types. You can now easily embed YouTube and Vimeo videos.
Experimental features
Image source: drupal.org
Workspace module and layout builder are some of the experimental features that are introduced with this update.
Workspace module lets you work on different projects simultaneously. You can segregate your projects using workspaces.
Content layout builder is an under-development experimental version. The stable version will be a powerful tool against authoring challenges.
Drupal 8.6 update package brings some much-needed additions to the table, such as:
- Nightwatch.js and Prettier is added to make it more familiar to Javascript and PHP developers.
- Tests are converted from SimpleTest to PHPUnit.
Whereas, JSON API was skipped in this update.
Any updates, whether it’s incremental or critical, means a mandatory upgrade for the older versions. Drupal will end support for Drupal 6 but support for Drupal 7 will continue.
Upgrade to Drupal 8.6 now.
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