Drupal 8.2 Release October 5th!

Earlier this month Acquia put on a great webinar hosted by Angie Byron & Gabor Hojtsy titled All You Need to Know About Drupal 8.2 and Beyond (slides linked below).

There were many topics covered and I could not help but get super excited for some things we can look forward to in the upcoming release of Drupal 8.2 slated for October 5th 2016.

Below are some takeaways I found particulary cool and wanted to share:

Migrate in Core

Currently we have a migrate UI available to us as a experimental core module. I have not played with this much to date but as a sitebuilder I am really excited to see efforts being made to develop a UI for this and bring it into core.  In previous migration efforts (using the migrate module) it was very much a job 100% slated for our devs and now I hope to be able to help with these efforts.  In Drupal 8.2 the migrate modules are still experemental but it looks like there was some mojor upgrades and a focus is being placed to get this out of experemental and into core sooner than later.

Content Workflow

Revision all the things! (well almost all the things)  The Content Workflow initiative is a result of Deploy and Workbench Suite of modules mantainers working together to bring this functionality into Drupal core.  These tools allow us to create/manage revisions and approval workflows for our content.  In Drupal 8.2 we are getting our first glimpse of this in core with the Content Moderation module added as an experimental core module for us to play with and provide feedback.  There is some really cool C.R.A.P. (create/read/archieve/purge) slated for this initiative down the road with things like Full-Site previews with "Workspaces".

Block Layouts

Some of you may remeber back in the early D8 beta days there being some work done on Block Layouts but it was pulled aong the way due to it not gong to be ready in time for launch.  Well in Drupal 8.2 we are getting a chance to see the some of this in action.  Again this is being released as a experemental core module. In 8.2 we will gain the ability to place blocks directy from the front end of the site and not have to access the blocks administration page.  This looks to be very much in line with how the inplace editor feels to an end user and an overall great usability improvement (especially for folks new to Drupal).

There are many other greats things in the works for Drupal core slated for 8.3-8.4 that were presented.  API Improvements, Enhanced media management, Dream Fields/Data modeling, Pre Content Type Layouts, Swapable Layouts and Preview-First Views UI just to name a few.

Check out the video/slides HERE for a full rundown and ways to help with all of these initiatives.

Thank you Acquia, Angie & Gabor for the exciting update!