What's new in Drupal 8

Hey all now days Drupal community is very hard at work in developing Drupal 8. If you are passionate about Drupal and want to contribute to Drupal 8 but not finding any source to start then this is blog can help you.

What we will cover in this blog :-

1       How to take Drupal 8 stable core to your local machine and start developing with it.

2       What's new in Drupal 8?

3       Some explanation of changes with code.

Below are the steps to setup Drupal 8 stable core to local machine. I am hoping you have GIT installed in your machine.

1       git clone --branch 7.x  http://git.drupal.org/project/drupal.git

2       cd Drupal

3       git checkout 8.x

If you want to go back to your D7 version just do " git checkout 7.x" . For updating your Drupal 8 core do "git pull" . It will update your Drupal 8 code instance .

Now you can start building your custom modules , Themes for Drupal 8 .

In Drupal 8 till now what community has updated has many changes in core . Below is link of list of changes in Drupal 8 .

http://drupal.org/list-changes/drupal

You can check out each change and start writing your code with Drupal 8 .

Menu change example :-In D8 menu links are converted into entities . So in order to create new menu in Drupal 8 you can do like this .

<?php

$menu_link = entity_create('menu_link', array(

  'link_title' => t('Home'),

  'link_path' => '<front>',

  'menu_name' => 'main',

));

$menu_link->save();

?>



Saving menu links with Drupal 8 :-



<?php

$menu_links = entity_load_multiple_by_properties('menu_link', array('link_path' => $link_path));

foreach ($menu_links as $menu_link) {

  $menu_link->link_title = t('New link title');

  $menu_link->save();

}

?>



Some changes are also happens with hooks like :-

hook_menu_link_alter() has been replaced by hook_menu_link_presave()

hook_translated_menu_link_alter() has been replaced by hook_menu_link_load().

Below are some other links which give you information about Drupal 8 development , roadmap , Documentation , code , contributors , IRC channels , meeting times etc.

http://drupal.org/community-initiatives/drupal-core

http://drupal.org/update/modules/7/8

This is link to video which drive you through some custom code development in Drupal 8 .

http://sydney2013.drupal.org/program/core-conversations

Some other links for understanding architecture and developing in Drupal 8 :-

http://drupal.org/node/1911346

Please feel free to comment and send your queries to me .