Since the last Drupal 8 core update, the API module maintainers started looking for co-maintainers, and Two-Factor Authentication was rolled out to anyone with the Community role on Drupal.org (among other improvements).

What's new with Drupal 8?

Drupal 8's minimum PHP version increased to 5.5.9, and minimum PostgreSQL version increased to 9.1.2. Also, tim-e handed off co-maintainership of the Contact module to Jibran Ijaz and Andrey Postnikov; and Frando stopped being a maintainer of the Entity, Form, and Render systems — special thanks to both tim-e and Frand for their amazing contributions!

Some other highlights of the month were:

• A bunch of usability problems on the advanced search form, on autocomplete controls in modal dialogs, and on the modules/extend page were fixed.
• Brian Altenhofel at VMdoh listed 6 reasons why Drupal 8 is an exciting step forward, and Gábor Hojtsy announced a multilingual site-building hacks contest.
• The D7 to D8 migration path saw some work, as the dblog and syslog modules got upgrade paths.
• Dylan Tack at Metal Toad explained why Drupal 8 won't ship with REST content negotiation, and Darryl Norris explained how to request a node via REST using web services.
• Sascha Grossenbacher at MD Systems wrote a script to run tests on modules with D8 support, and Jon Peck at Four Kitchens explained his progress porting Site Audit to Drupal 8.
• To improve performance, CSRF links were made cachable, all token replacements now have cacheability metadata, and for certain LanguageManager strings, the number of calls to the t() function were reduced.
• Amber Matz of Drupalize.me wrote an article on learning Drupal 8 by looking at boilerplate code,
• Tim Millwood explained how to override Drupal 8 services, and Alex Pott at Chapter Three continued his series on configuration management with a post on configuration dependencies.
• To improve the developer experience, Text input form elements were documented as part of the push to move away from a monolithic, manually-maintained HTML file documenting the Form API, the custom menu caching strategy in the Toolbar module was replaced with Core's standard caching, and the Symfony response view listener learned to accept PSR-7 Response objects.
• A lot of discussion on building Drupal 8 sites is happening in the g.d.o group on Drupal 8 production sites.
• ThemeManager::theme() was renamed to ThemeManager::render()

How can I help get Drupal 8 finished?

See Help get Drupal 8 released! for updated information on the current state of the software and more information on how you can help.

We're also looking for more contributors to help compile these posts. Contact mparker17 if you'd like to help!

Drupal 8 In Real Life

• Drupal Camp Costa Rica will be July 29–31 in San Pedro Montes de Oca, San José, Costa Rica. The schedule includes sessions on the RESTful features of Drupal 8, Drupal 8 for small sites, theming D8, migrating D7 sites to D8, writing D8 modules from scratch, and the Drupal Console project. Don't forget to register!
• There will be a Drupal 8 sprint weekend July 31–August 2 in the Wunderkraut offices in Munich, Bavaria, Germany.
• DrupalCorn Camp 2015 will be July 31–August 2 in Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA, with sessions on D8 media management, and a full-day sprint. Early-bird tickets are already sold out, but you can still register for regular-priced tickets.
• Design4Drupal will be July 31–August 2 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, featuring sessions on Drupal 8 theming, and Drupal 8 for designers.
• Drupal Camp PA will be August 1–2 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA with sessions on Drupal 8 theming and asset management.
• Drupalaton will be August 6–9 in Lake Balaton, Keszthely, Hungary. Tickets are still available, but you must sign up for the Drupalaton sprints separately. There are a number of sessions on Drupal 8 plus a full day of sprinting!
• acouch and the other awesome folks at NuCivic are organizing a Hackathon in Lieu of DrupalCamp Wisconsin on August 7 in Madison, Wisconson 53703.
• Drupal Rush In Sprints #2 will be held August 8 in Delhi, India.
• One of the biggest Drupal sprints every year, the Drupal MidWest Developers Summit will be August 12–15 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. Don't forget to register for this awesome event!
• Drupal Camp Asheville will be August 14–15 in Asheville, North Carolina, USA. August 14th will be a day of sprints!

Whew! That's a wrap!

Do you follow Drupal Planet with devotion, or keep a close eye on the Drupal event calendar, or git pull origin 8.0.x every morning without fail before your coffee? We're looking for more contributors to help compile these posts. You could either take a few hours once every six weeks or so to put together a whole post, or help with one section more regularly. If you'd like to volunteer for helping to draft these posts, please follow the steps here!