What better way to start a brand new year than by fixing/leaving behind some of the previous one's bad aspects? And from a Drupal developer's standpoint, some of these specific aspects are given by Drupal 8's errors and bugs slowing you down and giving you plenty of moments of hair-pulling frustration. Therefore, Drupal 8.4.4, the latest patch for Drupal 8, makes a great jumpstart for 2018!
But before I “unveil” to you those issues of critical importance that this new patch release comes to solve, let's engage in a super quick recap of Drupal 8.4.0's 2 most acclaimed features and improvements:
1. Several Experimental Modules Leveled Up to a Stable Status
So they've made it to the core, much to our delight, the Drupal developers who had long waited for this “graduation”. To name just a few now:
And this is just a great deal of effort and a huge amount of work turned into tangible results. Yet, equally significant resources of time and energy have been invested in other initiatives, as well.
In addressing other well-known issues which haven't yet made it to their final phase (where they shape into concrete results for us to leverage):
- improving the content moderation capabilities and workflow in Drupal core (with the Workflows module no longer wearing the “experimental” status now)
- improving the REST & API-first capabilities
- upgrading the “cluster” of Migrate modules
2. Multiple Third-Party Dependencies Got a Well-Deserved Upgrade
As you well remember, it was upon Drupal 8.4.0's release when:
- CKEditor got upgraded to its 4.7.1 version
- jQuery to version 3
- PHPUnit to its 4.8.35 version
- and Symfony to 3.2
Moreover, Airbnb's style guide version 14.1 became the new “norm”, within the Drupal community, in terms of style guide for the JavaScript code.
And now, here are 2 strong reasons why you should get all pumped up for this release.
2 Major Issues That Drupal 8.4.4 Comes to Solve
- the “[PHP 7.2] count() parameter must be an array or an object that implements Countable” issue has been addressed with an important note of the core maintaining team, specifying that they commit to solving the bug still existing on PHP 7.2 by the time Drupal 8.5.0 gets released
- the “Concurrently editing two translations of a node may result in data loss for non-translatable fields” problem has been fixed, as well
Have these 2 Drupal 8 issues been dragging you down for a while now? If so, then the release of the latest patch for D8, Drupal 8.4.4, turns out to be more than well timed!
Note: besides the above-mentioned note regarding the still persisting bug on PHP 7.2 to be tackled, do keep in mind that Drupal 8.4 is no longer compatible with previous versions of Drush (not to mention all the other third-party software upgrading processes that it's gone through); therefore it's time to level up (if you haven't already).
The END! Time to download and to add on your new year's patch: Drupal 8.4.4. Happy developing!