Drupal 8 continues to gain momentum; in fact, Drupal 8.1 is already available! More and more modules continue to be migrated over from Drupal 7 and we’ve been chronicling them — along with other Drupal 8 news — on the Acquia Developer Center blog. Let’s take a look at Responsive and off-canvas menu, Display Suite, and Media Entity.
Responsive and off-canvas menu
Maintainers: Tancredi D’Onofrio, aka tanc on Drupal.org, is Senior Developer and Technical Lead at the UK-based Agile Collective Ltd. co-operative company, which specializes in Drupal and open source solutions for clients in the public sector, charities, and social enterprises.
What Does Responsive and off-canvas menu Do?
On mobile devices, the module provides an off-canvas menu triggered by swipe gestures or a ‘burger’ icon; on desktop-width displays, it provides a horizontal menu with drop-downs. Tancredi explains how this enhances Drupal 8: “Out-of-the-box, D8 provides a method of rendering your chosen menu in a block. It’s up to you and your theme to make it function, respond and look how you want. This module also provides a block to render your menu in but only down to a specified breakpoint. Below that breakpoint, this module renders your menu as an off-canvas slide-out panel that is activated by a triggering ‘burger’ icon.”
Why Does It Matter?
This module gives site builders a fairly simple solution to the mobile menu problem while not dictating or limiting too much how you have to present your desktop-sized menu. Given that it is quick and easy to implement — and it looks pretty good — it should reduce the cost of producing a custom mobile menu. Simply install the module and configure its settings. The only caveat here, according to Tancredi, is that, “The module requires a small amount of CSS theming knowledge. In particular, the horizontal menu will need colors applied to it to fit the site theme." One nice “bonus” feature is that on a site with multiple menus, the mobile menu can be comprised of multiple Drupal menus combined together. So if you have a ‘main menu’ and a ‘utility menu’ at desktop size, these two menus are then merged to be displayed in a single off-canvas mobile menu.
Check out the full Responsive and off-canvas menu profile in the Acquia Developer Center blog
Display Suite
Maintainers: Kristof De Jaeger and Bram Goffings (swentel and aspilicious on Drupal.org). Bram actually got his start in Drupal working as an intern under Kristof on Display Suite. Nowadays, Bram is the technical lead at Belgian agency Nascom and Kristof is a Drupal core developer and co-owner of a small digital agency in Belgium called eps & kaas.
What Does Display Suite Do?
Display Suite (“DS”) gives you the power to control how your site content is displayed using a drag and drop admin interface — without any of the coding or deep Drupal-technical knowledge of theme template files you’d need otherwise. With Display Suite, you don’t need to ask your developer colleague, Drupal service provider, or geek friend for help arranging your nodes, views, teaser lists, search results, comments, user data, etc. You can just get on with arranging how your content is displayed.
Kristof explains that "DS simply works out-of-the-box (as soon as you have entities on your site), “It allows you to swap out layouts for every entity and for every view mode available on your site using the Field UI.” Even better, “It also allows you to access and rearrange display fields in the Field UI that are otherwise (without Display Suite) unavailable to you.”
