Everyone’s excited for Drupal 8 to come out. Now that we’re flirting with 0 critical bugs, we wanted to give a shout out to everyone who has put their hard work and love into building Drupal 8. We’re almost to the finish line, and everyone deserves hugs and high-fives for all their amazing work.

We’re looking forward to the announcement of a Drupal 8 release candidate as soon as October 7, and we’re working hard to put together materials that everyone can use to shout from the rooftops that Drupal 8 is in its final stage of development. We’ve still got a lot of work ahead of us, but the Drupal Association feels that now is a good time for our community to pause, take a deep breath, give each other pats on the back, and look at what the future holds.

Our communications plan

We’ve fielded a lot of interest in spreading the word about the Drupal 8 release candidate and the eventual release of Drupal 8. We’ve got a plan that we’re excited about, and we’re hoping for help from the community. The more we can all create content about the specific features in Drupal 8, the better! We’d also love to share content made by our community that speaks to different audiences — for example, why Drupal 8 is the best platform for government or university websites. Over the next few weeks, we hope to add our community’s amazing content to the Drupal 8 landing page.

Here are a few other ways you can help:

• Planning on hosting a release party? Share the details and we'll help spread the word about your event.
• Are you already building sites with Drupal 8? Share a link in social media and tag it #madewithdrupal8. You can also add it to the list on groups.drupal.org.
• If you have demos, white papers, blog posts, or some other materials that talk about the virtues of D8, share it on social media and tag it #drupal8rc.

We couldn’t be more excited for Drupal 8. We’re in the last leg now of huge effort and we should all be tremendously proud of ourselves. Big thanks especially to our amazing Core Maintainers and all of our wonderful contributors who have worked hard on the project.

Drupal 8 artwork by Paul Johnson (pdjohnson) and CTI Digital