Software update: Drupal 8.4.0

Version 8.4.0 of Drupal has been released. Drupal is a PHP-written, user-friendly and powerful content management platform, with which, for example, websites can be created. It’s simple enough for a novice user, but powerful enough to build a more complex website as well. The program includes a content management platform and a development framework. The release notes for version 8.4.0 can be found below.

What’s new in Drupal 8.4.0?

This new version is an important milestone of stability for Drupal 8. It adds under-the-hood improvements to enable stable releases of key contributed modules for layouts, media, and calendaring. Many other core experimental modules have also become stable in this release, including modules for displaying form errors inline and managing workflows.

The release includes several very important fixes for content revision data integrity as well as an update to stop the deletion of orphaned files that was causing data loss for many sites, alongside numerous improvements for site builders and content authors.

Important: If you use rush to manage Drupal, be sure to update to Drush 8.1.12 or higher before updating Drupal. Updating to Drupal 8.4.0 using Drush 8.1.11 or earlier will fail. (Always test minor version updates carefully before making them live.)

Inline Form Errors

The Inline Form Errors module provides a summary of any validation errors at the top of a form and places the individual error messages next to the form elements themselves. This helps users understand which entries need to be fixed, and how. Inline Form Errors was provided as an experimental module from Drupal 8.0.0 on, but it is now stable and polished enough for production use.

Datetime Range

The Datetime Range module provides a field type that allows end dates to support contributed modules like calendar. This stable release is backwards-compatible with the Drupal 8.3.x experimental version and shares a consistent API with other Datetime fields. Future releases may improve Views support, usability, Datetime Range field validation, and REST support.

Layout Discovery API

The Layout Discovery module provides an API for modules or themes to register layouts as well as five common layouts. Providing this API in core enables core and contributed layout solutions like Panels and Display Suite to be compatible with each other. This stable release is backwards-compatible with the 8.3.x experimental version and introduces support for per-region attributes.

Media API

The new core Media module provides an API for reusable media entities and references. It is based on the contributed Media Entity module.

Since there is a rich ecosystem of Drupal contributed modules built on Media Entity, the top priority for this release is to provide a stable core API and data model for a smoother transition for these modules. Developers and expert site builders can now add Media as a dependency. Work is underway to provide an update path for existing sites’ Media Entity data and to port existing contributed modules to the refined core API.

Note that the core Media module is currently marked hidden and will not appear on the ‘Extend’ (module administration) page. (Enabling a contributed module that depends on the core Media module will also enable Media automatically.) The module will be displayed to site builders normally once related user experience issues are resolved in a future release.

Similarly, the REST API and normalizations for Media are not final and support for decoupled applications will be improved in a future release.

Content authoring and site administration experience improvements

The “Save and keep (un)published” dropbutton has been replaced with a “Published” checkbox and single “Save” button. The “Save and…” dropbutton was a new design in Drupal 8, but users found it confusing, so we have restored a design that is more similar to the user interface for Drupal 7 and earlier.

Both the “Comments” administration page at `/admin/content/comment` and the “Recent log messages” report provided by dblog are now configurable views. This allows site builders to easily customize, replace or clone these screens.

Updated migrations

This release adds date and node reference support for Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 migrations. Core provides migrations for most Drupal 6 data and can be used for migrating Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 8, and the Drupal 6 to 8 migration path is nearing beta stability. Some gaps remain, such as for some internationalization data. The Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration is incomplete but is suitable for developers who would like to help improve the migration and can be used to test upgrades especially for simple Drupal 7 sites. Most high-priority migrations are available.

Moderation and workflows

The Workflows module is now also stable, however it only provides a framework for managing workflows and is not directly useful in itself. The experimental Content Moderation module allows workflows to be applied to content and is now at beta stability. Content moderation workflows can now apply to any entity types that support revisions, and numerous usability issues and critical bugs are resolved in this release.

Platform features for web services

Drupal 8.4 continues to expand Drupal’s support for web services that benefit decoupled sites and applications, including a 15% performance improvement for authenticated REST requests, expanded REST functionality, and developer-facing improvements.

Further details are available about each area in the 8.4.0 release notes.