We confidently believe that Drupal 8 is going to be great for users out of the box. There are a number of significant user experience and user interface elements that are in Drupal core that are going to make substantial improvements to new and existing users alongside Drupal 8 being even quicker out of the box. In this post I am going to focus on the user or content editor experience and focus on more developer focussed parts in a subsequent blog post.
Everyone knows that Drupal is a great content management system, enabling users to make complex web applications that scale well and integrate with a wealth of other technologies. The function set enabled by utilising drupal.org and open source is massive and with over 2 million registered users on drupal.org, it is one of the biggest software projects in the world. However, Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 out of the box left a lot to be desired for new users. It is difficult as an experienced user to look objectively at Drupal as we already have been extending Drupal since 2008, however, if you are a new user and Drupal 7 is your start point it can be a pretty daunting process. There are hundreds of new terms to learn and almost no expected functionality is included from Drupal core to easily make a site, almost every single site, simple or otherwise, has tens (or hundreds) of contributed modules to extend functionality. Even simple brochureware sites have them. When we think about the amount of overhead and complexity it adds, it does not make Drupal competitive to Wordpress to new users
Drupal 8 is changing all of that. Out of the box it is both far simpler i terms of its use, and packs a lot more functionality that is needed for modern web applications. You may even be able to make brocureware sites entirely from Drupal 8 core modules, something that would seems crazy in previous Drupal versions. Drupal 8: Installation and Language Selection
The first screen you see when installing Drupal 8 is language selection. And whatever language you select, that is the language that everything else is in after that. With only about 400 million people using English as their first language, being able to instanly select other languages is a massive benefit. Welcome to the rest of the world!
Drupal 8 has two great improvements on Drupal 7 with regards to the administrator interface. Firstly, it is responsive, Bartik (the default theme) is responsive and Seven (the default admin theme) are both responsive. However, when you add to this navbar a responsive, moveable administration interface, you have an admin interface that is ready for modern administration; out of the box!
The main reason that anyone would install a content management system (or content management framework) is to manage content. So it makes sense that the first thing that a new users would look to do is create some content. In Drupal 8, that is easier than ever before. Not only is there a WYSIWYG editor (CKeditor), in core, but we can also upload images/media without having to install anything extra! So users can straight away start making html content in basic pages within seconds of installing.
Another great improvement is In Place Editing (inline editing) for content. Although it can be good to edit content from a separate form, sometimes it can be useful to see exacltly what your content is going to look like on the site. In Drupal 8 you can do that, Quick Edit, enables you to change content without loading the form and see exactly what that content will look like.
Both of these come with Drupals versioning and revision system, making managing content simple and effective. Excellent content editing: Out of the box!
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