Software update: Drupal 8.1.0

The final release of Drupal version 8.1 has been released. Drupal is a PHP-written, user-friendly and powerful content management platform, with which, for example, websites can be created. In version 8, responsive templates are enabled by default, so a website always looks good, regardless of the device used to view it. Drupal 8 has made the switch from xhtml to html5, which makes web apps possible, among other things. Furthermore, the source code written in PHP has been considerably cleaned up and modernized and the performance has been improved through smarter caching. Version 8.1.0 also includes an experimental module that should help migrate Drupal 6 and 7 websites to version 8. Another module, called BigPipe, promises further performance improvements.

Drupal 8.1.0 is now available
Drupal 8.1.0, the first minor release of Drupal 8, is now available. With Drupal 8, we made significant changes in our release process, adopting semantic versioning and scheduled feature releases. This allows us to make extensive improvements to Drupal 8 in a timely fashion while still providing backwards compatibility. Drupal 8.1.0 is the first such update.

What’s new in Drupal 8.1.x?
Drupal 8.1.0 comes with numerous improvements, including CKEditor WYSIWYG enhancements, added APIs, an improved help page, and two new experimental modules. (Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.)

Experimental UI for migrations from Drupal 6 and 7
Drupal 8.1.0 now includes the Migrate Drupal UI module, which provides a user interface for Drupal core migrations. Use it to migrate Drupal 6 or 7 sites to Drupal 8. The user guide on migrating from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8 has full documentation. Note that the Drupal 8 Migrate module suite is still experimental and has known issues. Read below for specific information on migration Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 sites with 8.1.0. (Always back up your data before performing a migration and review the results carefully.)

BigPipe for perceived performance
The Drupal 8 BigPipe module provides an advanced implementation of Facebook’s BigPipe page rendering strategy, leading to greatly improved perceived performance for pages with dynamic, personalized, or uncacheable content. see the BigPipe documentation.

CKEditor WYSIWYG spell checking and language button
Drupal 8.0.0 included the CKEditor module (a WYSIWYG editor), but it was not previously possible to use your browser’s built-in spell checker with it to check the text. With Drupal 8.1.0, spell checking is now enabled within CKEditor as well.
Another great improvement is the addition of the optional language markup button in CKEditor. When configured to appear in your editing toolbar, it allows you to assign language information to parts of the text, which is useful for accessibility and machine processing.

Improved help page with tours
Drupal 8.0.0 included a new system for help tutorials called tours with the core Tour module. In Drupal 8.1.0, we made these tours easier to discover by listing them in the administrative help overview at /admin/help.
The help overview page is also more flexible now, so contributed modules can add sections to it and themes can override its appearance more easily. You can read more about the new system in the change record for the updated help pageor refer to the Tour API documentation for how to add tours for your modules.

Rendered entities in Views fields
Drupal 8.1.0 now includes a rendered entity field handler for Views, which allows placing a fully rendered entity within a view field. For example, this feature could be used to display a rendered user profile for each node author in a table listing node content. This feature was provided by the Entity contributed module in Drupal 7, but had not yet been available in Drupal 8.

Support for JavaScript automated testing
Drupal 8.1.0 adds support for automated testing of JavaScript, which will mean fewer bugs with Drupal’s JavaScript functionality in the future as we write new tests for it. (Read more about how to run the JavaScript tests.) There are also other improvements to the testing system, including improved reporting of PHPUnit and other test results.

Improved Composer support
Starting with Drupal 8.1.x, Drupal core and its dependencies are packaged by Composer on Drupal.org. This means that sites and modules can now also use composer to manage all of their third-party dependencies (rather than having to work around the vendor directory that previously shipped with core).

Developer API improvements
Minor releases like Drupal 8.1.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features. Read the 8.1.0 release notes for more details on the many improvements for developers in this release.