Release offers all-new stable layout builder, meets web accessibility guidelines
Washington D.C., Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - The Drupal community announces an update to Drupal 8. This new version — Drupal 8.7.0 — is a leap forward in the Drupal content manager experience as a creative tool streamlining workflows and improving efficiency within teams. Drupal 8.7.0 also maintains the project's commitment to web content accessibility guidelines, enabling screen readers or keyboards to navigate options — meaning this version is accessible to all.
Drupal's newly stable Layout Builder module enables a drag-and-drop editing experience, which means no custom code or theming is required in order to lay out pages. But Drupal goes far beyond similar offerings by competitors, empowering content editors with increased power and flexibility: enabling management of templated layouts, support for powerful overrides based on content-type, and support for one-off landing pages.
“Not only can this version support basic use cases, it also supports advanced use cases,” said Drupal Founder Dries Buytaert. “These types of templated layouts and workflow updates are not available in competitors’ layout building tools.”
Drupal 8.7.0 provides significant improvements over all past versions of Drupal, particularly by including JSON:API as a stable module in core. By enabling the JSON:API module, all Drupal entities such as blog posts, users, tags, comments and more become accessible via the JSON:API web service API. This is a powerful, standards-compliant, web service API to pull content into JavaScript applications, digital kiosks, chatbots, voice assistants and more. This propels Drupal further into the lead among headless content management systems, making it the clear choice for the backbone of digital experiences beyond the web.
Drupal 8.7.0 provides the JSON:API for reading and modifying resources, interacting with relationships between resources, and filtering, sorting, and pagination of resource collections. It also supports complex workflows, allowing for a staging or approval process.
Tim Lehnen, Executive Director of the Drupal Association, said, “Drupal 8.7 is a milestone release for the Drupal project. It simultaneously extends Drupal's lead as a powerful, API-first content framework, and leapfrogs competitors' tools for content editors.”
In addition to being incredibly powerful, JSON:API is easy to learn and put into practice, and uses all the existing tooling to test, debug, and scale Drupal sites.
“This feels like the dawn of a new chapter for Drupal and its authoring experience and we’re certain we’ve only scratched the surface,” said Caroline Casals, a developer at Phase2 - a digital experience agency.
Overall, this version streamlines the user experience for Drupal content creators and site builders, allowing front-end developers to work easily and efficiently. More than two years’ of commits from the open source community built this rigorous release.
“On behalf of the Drupal Association and the Drupal community, I want to thank all of the contributors who made the Drupal 8.7.0 release possible,” Lehnen said.
About Drupal
Drupal is content management software. It is used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. What sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile, structured content that ambitious web experiences need.
About the Drupal Association
The Drupal Association is dedicated to fostering and supporting the Drupal project, the community and its growth. The Drupal Association helps the Drupal community with funding, infrastructure, education, promotion, distribution and online collaboration.
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