Drupal 8: Empowering Content Publishing

By Shraddha Dubey, Digital Marketing Specialist, Globant

Introduction

When we hear Content Publishing or Content Management System (CMS), one of the first names that pops up in our mind is Drupal. Since the time it was introduced, Drupal has always been spoken of owing to its customizable features and ease of use. It doesn’t matter whether you come from a technical background or not, using Drupal is cakewalk once you know its basics. In this article, we’re going to focus on some prominent content publishing features of Drupal 8.

You might wonder when there are tools such as WordPress and AEM for Content Publishing, then what makes Drupal such an out-of-the-box content publishing tool? What makes it stand out from the other tools available to us?

Here are some innovative features that will help you understand what makes Drupal 8 stand out. Let’s get started.

Easiest content scribbling and management: Publishing is often preceded by editing the content in hand. Along with the infamous WYSIWYG’s CKEditor bundled to its core combined with improved inline editing via Drupal’s spark distribution, Drupal 8 also allows fine-tuning content access and permissions. This makes Drupal 8 superior to its earlier versions when it comes to security and content creation.

API Networking Services: Being able to push your content to all the types of platforms simultaneously and efficiently demands a need for powerful web services API. Drupal 8 has a set of enhanced RESTful and RELAXed web services containing a variety of modules. These are supported by JSON API and GraphQL (Facebook’s open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs), creating a strong and stable communication of Drupal nodes with the JavaScript or TypeScript framework.

Apart from connecting Drupal to the APIs through web services, Drupal 8 also has augmented support for third party integrations. You can easily switch from Google Analytics to Google Tag Manager and other analytics platforms, ERP systems, marketing systems, or any other verticals that you want your published site or content integrated with.

Media Management: Content Management not only in terms of text, but Drupal is also proficient in handling media such as images, videos, and other important files. Moreover, you can create some other assets as well such as Tweets or social posts. There are custom libraries that can be restricted to particular media files. Media Module in Drupal 8 is a drop-in substitute for upload field with a unified User Interface where editors and administrators can seamlessly upload, manage and reuse various files and multimedia assets. Know more about Media and Assets Management Modules here.

Multilingual Facility: Drupal 8 seamlessly allows you to handle multilingual content on your website. The admin interface can have built-in translations. You can also filter blocks based on the language you are looking for.

Moreover, as seen in the screenshot below, modules like Content languages and translations, User interface translation, Configuration translation, Languages are perks of upgrading your Drupal from its earlier version to 8. Let’s understand the usage of each module below:

• Regional settings: You can configure the local time zone with these settings.
• Date and time formats: This will help you to set how dates and times will be displayed.
• Languages: Configure different languages for content, interface and configuration.
• Content language and translation: This helps in customizing language and translations support for content.
• User interface translation: One of the most useful features, you can configure the import of translation files, and add and customize interface translations.
• Configure translation: Using this, you can translate the configuration.

Taxonomies: Taxonomy is a lifesaver for publishing sites. Taxonomy Manager organizes, classifies, and relates your site’s content. It is used to categorize similar content into a set. You can add as many taxonomies as you need along with easy bulk adding, editing, and removing of terms and classifications. Let’s see an example to understand that clearly.

Suppose your company has 100 offices around the globe and someone wants to only see the information of a particular country, there comes Taxonomy in action. With the use of Taxonomy Manager, you can add dropdown menus of different countries from which the user can filter the content (based on which country he wants the address for) according to its requirement.

Let’s take a live example from globant.com website. Here, we have Globant Photos segregated with different Categories such as Offices, Globers, Culture, and Converge where users can easily filter the results based on their preference . This is made possible with the help of the Taxonomy Manager.

Thunder: The Drupal 8 distribution for professional publishing

After the initial release of Drupal 8 in November 2015, the DrupalCon was introduced in the following year and was sponsored by, Thunder, an easy-to-install, deploy and use, with especially publisher centric designed modules released as open-source software, incurred with GNU general public license. The idea behind Thunder was to let publishers compete on the basis of brand and content, and not the technology.
Read more about the Thunder community here.

If you are new to Drupal and content publishing, you might find it a bit alienating in the first few days, but with its vast features and updates introducing endless possibilities will keep you mesmerized. The features mentioned here are just the tip of the iceberg. Getting to know Drupal 8 hands-on will show you how easy and comprehending content publishing can be.

Happy Content Publishing with Drupal 8!😊