Today is an exciting day for the Drupal community! Collectively, we’re all moving a few steps closer to a full release of Drupal 8 with the help of a program called Drupal 8 Accelerate. This is a pilot program from the Drupal Association designed to put $250,000 of community funds towards eliminating the last 50 critical issues between us and release.

The Drupal Association has been an incredible leader in the effort to release Drupal 8, pledging to set aside $62,500 to match every dollar donated to the provide Drupal 8 Acceleration Grants.

What’s the latest with Drupal 8 Accelerate?

But we knew we could do even more to turbocharge this project. Today we are announcing that D8 Accelerate is now getting a huge boost from seven anchor sponsors, who have pledged to “match the match,” amplifying every donation made and accelerating the community’s investment in Drupal 8.

Phase2, Acquia, Appnovation, Lullabot, Palantir, PreviousNext, and Wunderkraut have collectively pledged another $62,500 to match the Drupal Association’s matches of community donations. This is an all-out, everyone-in community effort to move D8 from beta to release. Our goal is to bring the total to $250,000 available for grants by September. We are now more than half way there.

Why should we all want Drupal 8 to succeed?

The answer is simple: D8 will empower us to use Drupal the way many of us have wanted to for a long time. D8 improves the API layer, multi-lingual capabilities, theming and the editor experience. It also makes is much more powerful for developers (which matters a lot to us at Phase2).

Historically, it has been a challenge to integrate new libraries or different front-end elements without a lot of leg work. Imagine, for example, how the availability of Twig theming will enhance your projects. Or how flexible implementations can be with dependencies on meaningful external software integrated through Symfony routing. We will even be able to more seamlessly incorporate mobile apps into the digital strategies we develop, correcting one of the main weak points of previous Drupal releases.

Put simply, Drupal 8 is a win for our collective clients, and therefore it is a win for all of us.

Phase2 & Drupal 8

At Phase2, we want Drupal 8 to succeed because our clients have increasingly big needs and major challenges, and we believe that Drupal 8 is moving in the direction to address those. For that reason, we’ve made investing in Drupal 8 a priority, not only by way of the Drupal 8 Accelerate program, but also in the form of contributed code and shared knowledge gleaned from major enterprise Drupal 8 implementations.

Taking on early Drupal 8 implementations enables us to commit our people to the D8 cause, while directly supporting our client’s mission. It also provides us with a group of advanced scouts to report back from the front lines and develop training for the rest of our team.

Principle among these scouts was Software Architect Jonathan Hedstrom, whose contributions to D8 include Drush support, core patch reviewing, testing and re-rolling, writing tests, modules upgrades (Redis), and more. In addition to Jonathan, Senior Developer Brad Wade made important front-end contributions, while Software Architect Mike Potter has been a significant part of Features development.

We’ll be sharing a lot of what we learned from our D8 work so far at DrupalCon Los Angeles, so stay tuned for our session announcements next!

 An all-out, everyone-in effort

It took the whole Drupal community – including individuals, companies, the Drupal Association – to get D8 to the place it is now. We are honored to have contributed alongside everyone involved. It has certainly been a heavy lift for many community members, so to each of these people and organizations, we say thank you. The success of Drupal 8 is the most important priority of our community.

However, Drupal 8 still needs a strong push to get over the finish line. So we must ask one more time for the support of our fellow Drupalers. We all have a major stake in the success of the project, and everyone can play an instrumental role getting it out the door. Even the smallest donation makes a difference when every dollar you donate is now matched, compounding your impact. You can read more about how the funds actually support the grant program to achieve the work on the Drupal Association D8 Accelerate page.

If you would like to donate, please visit the D8 Accelerate Fundraising site and please consider using my profile as a way to easily make your contribution so we can start enjoying those launch parties!