For the last five years, tens of thousands of hours have been poured into the the next major release of Drupal: Drupal 8. With the release candidate announced for October 7 at DrupalCon Barcelona, now is the time to prepare your sites and teams for the transition.
This release will have a significant impact for all users of open source Content Management Systems: it adds hundreds of new features, first class accessibility and mobile support, and modern underlying architecture to your favourite open source CMS.
Now the release candidate is available, you’ll be able to begin to develop sites using Drupal 8 RC1 with the confidence of a locked down API, regular releases and upgrade paths for your site.
Leading up to the release candidate, there’s been months of beta releases which have been tested by end users in test (and even some production) sites, to uncover issues that are considered critical to a full release.
A critical issue is one that is considered severe enough to block a release, and this is typically due to: Data loss bugs, performance issues, security vulnerabilities, or an API change that will be impossible to change without breaking backwards compatibility once a release is made. The release candidate is available now the number of critical issues has reached zero.
Regular Release Cycles
There are likely to be critical issues that come up during the release candidate period, however these are strictly triaged by branch maintainers, and any change will be ruled out that breaks backwards compatibility.
During the release candidate period, there will be regular releases every fortnight.
Full Release
There will be an 8.0.0 release once we have a stable release candidate period for three consecutive weeks. Following the full release, and in addition to the monthly bug fix and security releases, there will be regular feature improvement releases every six months. No more waiting 5 years for your favourite feature to be included!
When should I start building my Drupal 8 site?
According to the Drupal project lead, Dries Buytaert, the answer is now!
Rather than an in-place upgrade, you can take advantage of one of the big features of Drupal 8: The Migration API. This provides full support for migrating content, users, and configuration from your Drupal 6 or 7 site to Drupal 8. The recommended approach is to build a new site in Drupal 8 then migrate everything into it.
With the new site building features, massive developer API and front-end developer improvements, this is now easier than ever.
PreviousNext is proud to be one of the Top 3 contributing companies globally to Drupal 8, and the number of features we have directly influenced includes:
- Translatable, fieldable and revisionable blocks
- Comments on any entity
- Tour module
- Mobile initiative
- Phone field
- Views
- Condition plugins
- Route controllers
- Modal API
- Validation API
This makes us uniquely qualified to help Australian organisations take full advantage of the advances in Drupal 8. Our team can provide the “Drupal 8 Ready” session as a 2hr workshop, backed by the full day “Getting Started with Drupal 8” training for content editors, site builders and developers.
If you have been waiting for this moment to start your Drupal 8 site, or have questions you’d like to ask the team, please get in touch with the PreviousNext team.
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