Earlier today, we released Drupal 8.5.0, which ships with improved features for content authors, site builders and developers.

Content authors can benefit from enhanced media support and content moderation workflows. It is now easier to upload, manage and reuse media assets, in addition to moving content between different workflow states (e.g. draft, archived, published, etc).

Drupal 8.5.0 also ships with a Settings Tray module, which improves the experience for site builders. Under the hood, the Settings Tray module uses Drupal 8.5's new off-canvas dialog library; Drupal module developers are encouraged to start using these new features to improve the end-user experience of their modules.

It's also exciting to see additional improvements to Drupal's REST API. With every new release, Drupal continues to extend investments in being an API-first platform, which makes it easier to integrate with JavaScript frameworks, mobile applications, marketing solutions and more.

Finally, Drupal 8.5 also ships with significant improvements for Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration. After four years of work, 1,300+ closed issues and contributions from over 570 Drualists, the migrate system's underlying architecture in Drupal 8.5 is fully stable. With the exception of sites with multilingual content, the migration path is now considered stable. Needless to say, this is a significant milestone.

These are just a few of the major highlights. For more details about what is new in Drupal 8.5, please check out the official release announcement and the detailed release notes.

What I'm probably most excited about is the fact that the new Drupal 8 release system is starting to hit its stride. The number of people contributing to Drupal continues to grow and the number of new features scheduled for Drupal 8.6 and beyond is exciting.

In future releases, we plan to add a media library, support for remote media types like YouTube videos, support for content staging, a layout builder, JSON API support, GraphQL support, a React-based administration application and a better out-of-the-box experience for evaluators. While we have made important progress on these features, they are not yet ready for core inclusion and/or production use. The layout builder is available in Drupal 8.5 as an experimental module; you can beta test the layout builder if you are interested in trying it out.

I want to extend a special thank you to the many contributors that helped make Drupal 8.5 possible. Hundreds of people and organizations have contributed to Drupal 8.5. It can be hard to appreciate what you can't see, but behind every bugfix and new feature there are a number of people and organizations that have given their time and resources to contribute back. Thank you!