What's new with Drupal 8?

Happy Earth Day! Since the last Drupal Core Update, the Drupal Developer Days event brought lots of exciting progress: we (briefly) reduced the number of critical issues to 35, and a week-long performance sprint made Drupal 8 2—20 times faster! Also, Gwendolyn Anello at DrupalEasy announced that DrupalEasy is partnering with Stetson University to offer Drupal courses!

Some other highlights of the month were:

• To improve end-user experience, JavaScript events on the string translation page were fixed, focus effects on vertical tabs were fixed, and Seven's fieldsets were styled.
• Pratomo Ardianto at X-Team developed an in-depth tutorial on theming in Drupal 8, Christopher Hall continued his series on theming in Drupal 8 with a breakdown of responsive breakpoints, and Wim Leers posted a tool to visualize Drupal 8's render tree.
• On the front-end, Phase 1 of the Consensus Banana initiative (moving CSS clases from preprocess functions to Twig templates) was completed, the active class was changed to is-active, and we fixed a bug where CSS in libraries would override CSS in themes.
• Théodore Biadala made an infographic on what Drupal 8 uses jQuery for, Blake Hall at Drupalize.me wrote about using Backbone.js and Underscore.js in D8, Daniel Sipos wrote a quick tutorial on how to attach JavaScript files to pages in Drupal 8, and Andreas Mayr wrote about third-part library integration in Drupal 8.
• To improve developer experience, the user_name handler is now handled by the Field API, and the Entity display class no longer depends on the field module.
• Joe Shindelar shared some tips & resources to get started with Drupal 8, Jimmy Berry unveiled a Drupal testbot command-line tool so you can run the full Drupal test suite on your local machine, Mark Ferree at Chapter Three shared his presentation on Drupal 8 module development, and Ray Saltini at Blink Reaction wrote a brief introduction to the Drupal Console project.
• Internal page caching was moved into a module so it can be easily turned off for development, core now uses the APC Classloader by default if it's available, and showing comments no longer requires generating temporary users for anonymous users.
• Mike Potter at Phase2 announced the Features module for Drupal 8.
• To clean up the API, update_project_storage(), element_info(), element_child() and element_children() (and element_info_property() was deprecated), drupal_form_submit() were all removed, and entity_load('image_style') and entity_load_multiple('image_style') were replaced with static method calls.
• Lauri Eskola at Druid wrote about his team's experiences launching a site on Drupal 8, John Locke at Freelock explained when Freelock recommends using Drupal 8 now, Kristof Van Tomme at Pronovix explained the Drupal 8 Accelerate funding program and how Pronovix is encouraging their customers to help, Chris Smith at OPIN Software Inc. interviewed Chris Luckhardt about Drupal 8, it's release date, and it's impact on the community, and Steve Burge at OSTraining announced a kickstarter to create free Drupal 8 training videos.
• Also, PHP7 EngineExceptions can now be caught in the general error handler and we can now perform front-end testing with the Mink driver.

How can I help get Drupal 8 done?

See Help get Drupal 8 released! for updated information on the current state of the release 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

• Cornell Drupal Camp starts tomorrow, April 23–24 in Ithaca, NY, USA with sessions on Drupal 8 for site builders, unit testing with PHPUnit, an introduction to Drupal 8 for end-users, and migrating Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 8.
• On Friday, April 24, there is a code sprint to port Views GeoJSON to Drupal 8 in Durham, NC, USA.
• The Village of Oak Park Drupal User Group is hosting a Drupal 8 core sprint on May 3 in Oak Park, IL, USA.
• DrupalJam will be taking place on April 30 in Utrecht, Netherlands with sessions on headless Drupal 8, responsive images, and continuous integration.
• DrupalCon Los Angeles in Los Angeles, CA, USA is only 19 days away (May 11–15, although sprints start on the 9th)! Regular ticket pricing ended last week, but late tickets are still available.
• DrupalCamp Spain will be May 22–24 in Jerez de la Frontera, Cádiz, Spain! There are still tickets left, and members of the Asociación española de Drupal get a 10% discount! There are sessions on Drupal 8 forms, theming, site-building, and building multilingual sites in D8.
• The Drupal North Regional Summit in Toronto, Ontario, Canada will be June 25–28. Registration is free, but you should register now so the event organizers can plan for you to be there. The event’s theme is Drupal 8!
• DrupalCamp Ottawa announced their new date and location: Friday, July 24 at University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

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!