Now that Drupal 8 is in beta, I’ve been trying to spend some more time with it. Reading articles and watching presentations are good ways to keep up with where things are (or are going), but nothing beats actually using it. Simplytest.me, Pantheon, and Acquia Cloud all now provide free ways to spin up an instance of the latest version (beta 4 as of this writing), so there’s no excuse not to try it out, even if a local setup seems daunting.
After clicking around a bit and admiring some of the administration interface improvements, I set to work on putting a test site together.
Arguably the most essential site building tool, Views in now part of Drupal 8 core. In being integrated, the module has also been leveraged to power most of the default lists and blocks (think content admin page, front page, taxonomy term pages, user admin page, recent content block, etc.). You can use your Views knowledge to modify these site elements or use them as starting points for your own creations.
Credit goes to the VDC (Views in Drupal Core) team for doing an excellent job of porting the module and converting to the new core plugin system. Although VDC wasn’t one of the original initiatives, it was one of the first ones ready, and the team was then able to use what it learned in the process to help out on other initiatives too.
The Views refactoring has brought many improvements, but in this post I’m going to focus on some new Displays functionality. A common task when putting a new site together is to customize the out-of-the-box pages (particularly the home page and content admin page), so I headed to Structure -> Views to copy a default view and get started.
After realizing that everything was mostly the same, one of the first differences I spotted was that you can now clone a display as a different type, so the block you’ve been working on can easily be turned into a page. Each display has its own “View” button, that now also allows you to “duplicate as”, which is slightly different from the old way of doing things. Technically, Views still uses the concept of a “Master” display that can be overridden. You can see it if you create a view with no display type, but it goes away after you create your first display. It pretty much disappears into the UI and is only present in the various settings’ “Apply” buttons — where you can save your changes by display or universally (“this display” vs “all displays”).
Examining the “duplicate as” options in my test view, I noticed three new display types:
Embed
In the Views module settings, you can choose to “Allow embedded displays”, and they can be used in code via views_embed_view().
Entity Reference
In your Entity Reference field settings, you can choose to “filter by an entity reference view” and use a view with this display type to determine what’s referenceable.
REST export (with RESTful Web Services enabled)
You can convert the output of a view into whatever format is requested, such as JSON or XML, and easily create a REST API for an application.
These Views improvements represent a few differences coming in D8, but are just a small taste of some of the exciting new functionality we have to look forward to in the near future. What Drupal 8 updates interest you the most?
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