14 DAY TRIAL // Great news for Web developers today, as Drupal 8 has been released after four long years of development and a never-ending cycle of alphas, betas, and release candidates.
The new CMS has been built on top of the Symfony 2.x PHP framework and comes with many new features.
Among the most important, we list support for mobile-first and responsive layouts, inline (in-page) WYSIWYG editing, and full compatibility with the upcoming PHP 7.x branch and with the PostgreSQL and SQLite databases. Support was previously provided for these databases, but now it's on the same level as MySQL.
While the CMS greatly needed mobile support, Drupal falling way behind other platforms when it came to backend UI&UX, there are also other nice tidbits that the dev team has added.
Here we list full support for localization and internationalization. Yes, Drupal now provides multilingual support out of the box, something that not even WordPress and Joomla can say they have.
Symfony 2 now powers Drupal's core
Since Drupal's underlying codebase was updated to the highly popular Symfony 2, all its adjacent technologies like Composer, Symfony2, Guzzle, and Twig are now also included with Drupal.
Additionally, developers will love the fact that almost all of their site's content will now be available via APIs.
Performance and scalability have also been improved, especially Drupal's content caching system.
Unlike the old Drupal 6 to 7 transition, the dev team seems to have negotiated this release a lot better, and module developers have had plenty of time to get their modules ready for the new branch.
If you're one of those users who couldn't get their head around terms like nodes, entities, fields, and views, Drupal 8 didn't become more newbie-friendly but took steps to be a CMS geared towards more astute developers.
The new CMS is available for download right now, from Drupal's homepage, its GitHub repository, or you can get it from Softpedia's download mirror.
