Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.
By Gábor Hojtsy on
What's new in Drupal 8.6.0?
The most significant update to Drupal 8 in its history, this new release includes two new easy ways to install Drupal, a cooking magazine demo, oEmbed media support, stable upgrades for monolingual Drupal sites, a new media library and workspaces experimental modules, significant layout improvements, various REST fixes and testing improvements.
oEmbed for media and a new experimental media library
New in this version is built-in stable oEmbed support for media. A new Remote video media type is shipped preconfigured to support embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos.
In a new experimental module, you can now browse existing media and add new media using an integrated widget. Adding multiple media at once is also supported. The media library is based on Views and may be customized.
Umami food magazine demo included
Drupal 8.6.0 offers a new demo profile and theme in the installer. A beautiful, modern demonstration of Drupal's capabilities using an imaginary cooking site named Umami. Drupal's data modeling, listing, page composition and content moderation capabilities are showcased. Sample author and magazine editor users are created to experience different aspects of using Drupal's content management interface. People are invited to tinker with the demo and learn general Drupal concepts and practices.
The demo profile and theme should not be used on (or as a basis of) actual production or development sites since no backwards compatibility or upgrade paths are provided. Future versions of Umami will demonstrate multilingual capabilities, and as they become stable: media handling, layouts and so on.
New experimental workspaces module
The existing content moderation functionality is great when you need to move individual pieces of content through an editing and approval workflow. For example, use states like Draft, Archived, and Published, and specify which roles have the ability to move content between states.
When "packages" of content (maybe a few, a few hundred or even a few thousand items) need to be reviewed and deployed at once, you'll find the new experimental Workspaces module invaluable. Define multiple workspaces, make changes and deploy between them with an intuitive user interface.
Much improved experimental layout capabilities
The experimental Layout Builder module now supports per-display customizations (e.g. full mode vs. search result), so instead of defining the order of fields stacked on top of each other there, you can define layouts with dynamic sections. It is also possible to create one-off blocks now for use in a specific layout, which will not show up in the global block list. This is useful for things like a promotion only visible within a single landing page.
Stable upgrades for monolingual sites, multilingual improved
Migration support has been steadily improving. This release sees both Migrate Drupal (migrations from previous major Drupal versions) as well as Migrate Drupal UI (upgrade user interface) modules go stable. This means that, if you have a monolingual Drupal 6 or 7 site, you can now use a supported and built-in user interface to migrate your site to Drupal 8.
Multilingual migrations are still experimental and now wrapped in the Migrate Drupal Multilingual module. Significant improvements in this area include support for Drupal 7 Entity Translation migrations for nodes with Title module support. Further testing and implementation of the missing pieces is still required for this module to become stable.
We also saw lots of improvements in migrations for contributed modules in the past six months. Many of the most popular modules, Paragraphs, Field Collections, Multifield, Media, Workflow, and more all have some level of support.
Two new easy ways to install Drupal
Drupal depends on various external tools. To make it significantly easier to start a quick evaluator or development environment, a quick-start command is now included that only needs PHP on the system. Using the built-in webserver in PHP and the SQLite database, it sets up Drupal quickly and opens a browser ready to use:
$ curl -sSO https://www.drupal.org/download-latest/zip
$ unzip drupal-x.y.z.zip
$ php drupal-x.y.z/core/scripts/drupal quick-start
18/18 [▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓]
Congratulations, you installed Drupal!
Username: admin
Password: NlH5cmfEzsbS3DSs
Drupal development server started: <http://127.0.0.1:8888>
This server is not meant for production use.
One time login url: <http://127.0.0.1:8888/user/reset/1/1525772031/pyK4gRFkQSGGKJk0GhZRucybqROZ2zvV85JwQiD3bFY/login>
Press Ctrl-C to quit the Drupal development server.
The installer now also recognizes existing configuration and provides an option to install from that configuration. This allows to rebuild a site (without its content) locally for development. (Drush also supports this feature with a new --existing-config option for drush site:install.)
MySQL 8 now supported
MySQL 8 includes several performance improvements and language/collation support changes. Drupal 8.6.0 supports MySQL 8. There are no plans to change database version requirements at this time.
Testing and REST improvements
The process of porting all tests from our own Simpletest implementation to PHPUnit is almost done. We have a total of 3,215 tests based on PHPUnit while 68 remain based on Simpletest in this release. The JavaScript testing system is also greatly improved by added support for Nightwatch.js, which supports writing automated tests in JavaScript itself. It is also now possible to upload files in REST requests among many other important bug fixes and improvements.
What does this mean for me?
Drupal 8 site owners
Update to 8.6.0 to continue receiving bug and security fixes. The next bugfix release (8.6.1) is scheduled for October 3 2018.
Updating your site from 8.5.6 to 8.6.0 with update.php is exactly the same as updating from 8.5.5 to 8.5.6. Drupal 8.6.0 also has updates to several dependencies. Modules, themes, and translations may need updates for these and other changes in this minor release, so test the update carefully before updating your production site.
Note that Drupal 8 will require PHP 7 starting in March 2019. If your site is hosted on PHP 5.5 or 5.6, you should begin planning to upgrade (and consider upgrading to PHP 7.2 for best results). See the Drupal core announcement about the PHP 5 end-of-life for more information.
Drupal 6 and 7 site owners
Drupal 7 is still fully supported and will continue to receive bug and security fixes throughout all minor releases of Drupal 8. Drupal 6 is no longer supported. You can now use the stable migration path for monolingual sites with the built-in upgrade user interface. For multilingual sites, please keep testing and reporting any issues you may find.
Translation, module, and theme contributors
Minor releases like Drupal 8.6.0 include backwards-compatible API additions for developers as well as new features. Read the 8.6.0 release notes for more details on the improvements for developers in this release.
Since minor releases are backwards-compatible, modules, themes, and translations that supported Drupal 8.5.x and earlier will be compatible with 8.6.x as well. However, the new version does include some changes to strings, user interfaces, internal APIs and API deprecations. This means that some small updates may be required for your translations, modules, and themes.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to Drupal 8.6!
