By Michael Ross

This article was published in the print magazine Drupal Watchdog, Volume 4 Issue 1, 2014-05, on page 20, by Tag1 Publishing. The magazine was distributed at Drupalcon Austin, 2014-06-02.

Compared to its predecessor, Drupal 8 offers website builders far more capabilities without the use of contributed modules, because it incorporates many of the most popular ones into core (e.g., Actions, CKEditor, Configuration Manager, Entity, and Views), as well as useful field types (e.g., Datetime, E-mail, Entity reference, Link, Options, and Telephone). Conversely, less popular core modules (e.g., Dashboard, OpenID, Overlay, PHP, and Poll) have been dropped. These improvements greatly increase the range of websites that can be built with vanilla Drupal, and reduce the time spent downloading commonly-used modules and scrolling past rarely-used ones.

Figure 1. Drupal 8 core modules sample

Copyright © 2014 Michael J. Ross. All rights reserved.