We've just achieved a big and exciting milestone in Drupal 8's development: starting with Drupal 8 beta 15, we are providing beta-to-beta upgrade paths. This will make it much easier to update Drupal 8 development sites between the current beta and future betas and release candidates.

There has been a lot of excitement building around Drupal 8. Many have been wondering when to start building Drupal 8 sites. The answer for many is NOW.

This change signals an important opportunity for organizations to begin developing with Drupal 8, especially for:

• Sites that rely mainly on the expanded functionality provided by Drupal 8 core alone.
• Projects that will take months of development time.
• Sites for which the benefits of Drupal 8's outweigh the effort needed to port (or work around) contributed modules that do not yet have Drupal 8 versions.

I strongly encourage you to evaluate Drupal 8 for your upcoming projects. Also, if you haven't already, now is the time to port contributed modules so they are ready in time for Drupal 8's release! There are only about five release-blocking issues left before we create the first release candidate.

Note that betas are not supported releases of Drupal, and both developing and launching sites with beta releases present risks. However, I'm pleased that various Drupal agencies, including Acquia, are helping to eliminate those risks through support, development, and hosting optimized for Drupal 8.

Before you get started with Drupal 8, be sure to review all the release notes for beta 15.