Why choose Drupal 8 over Drupal 7 & 6?

Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems. As a web developer, it’s been my experience that we can build apps faster `in Drupal than in any other CMS. It has the flexibility to create multiple content types without hard-core programming skills. We can enhance its functionality by adding contributed modules, effective web designing templates and some great themes with a lot of options for customizations. There are also a lot of contributed features like views, panel, feature modules that help developers to create robust Drupal applications. Though deployment is a little difficult in Drupal 7, the feature module can be a great help.

Image credit: www.phase2technology.com

With Drupal 8 being recently launched, there are a lot of useful features added in the core modules. Drupal 7 too has been a fantastic CMS as compared to the Drupal 6 version; but at the same time, it shows limitations when it comes to Incomplete Entity API, Separation between content and configurations. Now the biggest question that arises is why should we chose Drupal 7 and after the Drupal 8 launch, why should we be choosing the latest version – just because it’s the latest? No! Let’s find out the detailed comparisons of all the last three Drupal versions:

How Drupal 7 improved on Drupal 6?

1. Layout and Usability Enhancements: The layout of Drupal 7 is quite user friendly. The quick short tags for many longer tasks are highly preferred by the web developers around the world.
2. Reduced Number of Modules: Drupal 6 had hundreds of modules, which made developers face difficulties enhancing the caching speed of websites. The 7th version contains lesser modules. It also provides an additional feature for formatting the text, media and other content folders.
3. Security: Drupal 7 has stronger security items as compared to Drupal 6. Drupal login system username and password saving in the database is more secure.
4. Database Structure and DB Queries: Drupal 7 uses the database abstraction layer – making the migration from MySQL to pgSQL or SQLite easier. Getting database results in terms of object database query syntax has also changed to better in Drupal 7.
5. Jquery/Ajax Load: Most of the AJAX codes in the Drupal documentation focus on traditional json/_get() applications, which require JSON manipulation of information on arrival at the client side. Using jQuery.load() function, with only a single line of JavaScript code, you can load from an URL address HTML code that will render directly to the target element on your site. drupal_delivery_html()returns a full HTML render page.

How Drupal 8 improves on Drupal 7?

1. Mobile Friendly: Drupal 8 is fully responsive and mobile friendly. We no longer need to create responsive themes manually as it takes care of it automatically.
2. Multilingual Capabilities: Drupal 8 has inbuilt user interfaces to translate anything in the system.
3. Configuration Management: Drupal 8 comes with a file system based configuration management system, which makes it simpler to transport configuration changes, such as new content types, fields, or views from development to production.
4. Built-in Web Services: Drupal 8 comes with Restful web services, which will make external web services like Eloqua, Marketo, Saleforce etc. much easier to integrate.
5. Fast Theming: Drupal 8 includes a flexible, fast and secure template engine for PHP called Twig. With Twig, templates are written with an easy-to-learn syntax, which offers greater security.
6. Views: In Drupal 8, views have been included in the core module. The front page listing and several administrative pages are rendered through views – with which, creating custom admin pages, front pages and customized filters become easier.
7. Object Oriented Approach: Drupal 8 comes with an object oriented approach. Drupal 8 core uses strong symfony PHP framework, which makes accessing of the external libraries easier.

Leverage the power of Drupal