whilst traditional REST is the more popular approach for fetching data, it may not be the best in solving many of the problems of handling hierarchical data. In comes GraphQL, a database querying language built by Facebook, to solve the limitations of REST - which may include overfetching, under fetching, multiple round-trips, and versioning issues.

Example of an update hook and a batch update for Drupal 8. Also, a more sane "body field".

With the release of Drupal 8, the core blocks system is now a powerful publishing system for content in sidebars or landing pages. Blocks have types, fields, revisions and many other benefits now that they are full Entities. If you are a coder, you'll be happy to know that these block types can also be created and extended using OOP techniques.

If you still use Drupal 7, have no fear! The Drupal 8 Block improvements are largely a port of the Bean module (Block Entities Aren't Nodes). Many of the techniques outlined in this session will be applicable to Drupal 7 with Beans.

I've been writing a lot about what I believe is important for the future of Drupal, but now it is your turn. After every major release of Drupal I do a "product management survey" to get your ideas and data on what to focus on for future releases of Drupal (8.x/9).

The image above illustrates how BigPipe can help even slow-to-render pages deliver usable content to the browser very quickly. If you have a block in a sidebar that pulls in some data from an external service, or only one tiny user-specific block (like a "Welcome, Jeff!" widget with a profile picture) that takes a half second or longer to render, Drupal can now serve the majority of a page immediately, then send the slower content when it's ready.