Welcome to the second quarter of 2015! In the past two weeks, Dries proposed an evolution to Drupal core's structure and decision-making process, the Drupal Community mourned the passing of Aaron Winborn and the Drupal Association announced The Aaron Winborn Award to honor amazing community members in his memory, Addison Berry was elected the 2015 Drupal Association Director At-Large, and lastly, a group to help mentors was formed.

What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal Core Update, Drupal 8.0.0-beta9 was released (beta8 was skipped due to installer issues), all known critical issues with the Drupal 8 configuration system were fixed, and the taxonomy term reference field was removed in favor of entity reference fields.

Some other highlights of the month were:

• In case you missed it last week, Drush 7 will get a release every time Drupal 8.0 gets a new beta or release candidate. This will make it easier to work with the latest beta.
• The Drupal 8 UI was changed to require a default alt attribute for image fields, and modules now cannot be installed if their configuration has unmet dependencies. Also, Views' configuration changed how it stored singular/plural strings to make it more compatible with languages other than English.
• Ralf Hendel, C.E.O. of comm-press raised funds for the Drupal 8 Accelerate grant program by performing a piano recital! You can watch the benefit concert on Youtube — but if you do, please consider donating!
• On the front-end, we cleaned up the CSS for Bartik layout, the book module, the Status report, the page title component, and cleaned up the footer page component's HTML and CSS. Also, you can now attach asset libraries directly from a template file.
• Christopher Hall wrote about his experiences theming Drupal 8.0.
• Several changes were made to improve developer experience: getting information about the current user no longer depends on the request and authentication manager, entity storage was refactored to load field values before instantiating entity objects, you can now access an entity object at all times when working with entity forms, and documentation about render array caching was improved.
• Berdir launched a service to show the status of automated tests in some D8 contrib modules, and Pronovix launched a service to e-mail you when your website is ready to update to Drupal 8.
• We improved Drupal's overall performance by making a couple of services lazy, making cache contexts hierarchical, removing some unused cache contexts, applying route access cachability results to the response, using a MemoryBackend when comparing configuration, and using a virtual file system for FileStorage tests.
• lakshminp continued his introduction to the Drupal 8 plugin system, and Francesco Placella explained how Drupal 8 stores entities.
• Roughly 10 patches to make Drupal 8 work with PostgreSQL landed; and Drupal 8 was hardened against attacks like the infamous SA-CORE-2014-005 by limiting PDO MySQL so it only executes single statements if PHP supports it.
• Webchick posted a proposal to re-activate the head2head project and use it to start work on the D8 beta-to-beta update path. Feedback is appreciated!
• Symfony was updated to 2.6.5, jQuery Once was upgraded a major version, and Guzzle was updated for compatibility with PHP 7.
• On the topic of PHP 7, initial tests doubled the performance of Drupal 8's installer, and work is progressing to make Drupal 8.0 fully compatible — in particular, two changes to avoid conflicts with reserved words broke a number of patches.
• MD Systems announced the first stable release of their Drupal 8 distribution for news portals, NP8, and already have a site using it: Southeast Switzerland media.
• Support for user signatures was moved to contrib, and the functions comment_load(), entity_load('comment'), and entity_load_multiple('comment') were removed.

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.

You can also raise money and/or donate to the Drupal 8 Accelerate grant program to fund Drupal 8 contribution sprints. For more information about how your donations are used, see webchick's detailed analysis.

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 Dev Days, a week of sprints among core contributors and Drupal veterans with awesome sessions on D8, is less than a month away (April 13—19), hosted in Montpellier, France. All the early bird tickets are gone, so buy your tickets soon!
• Drupal Dev Day NYC 2015 will be a full-day Drupal unconference and Drupal 8 sprint event, held on April 19th in New York, NY, USA. There is no admission, but you should still register if you plan to attend so the organizers can plan for it.
• DrupalCon Los Angeles is coming up fast, on May 11—15 in Los Angeles, CA, USA. Buy your tickets now!
• Drupal Gov Con is coming up on July 22-26 in Bethesda, MD, USA. Two days are dedicated entirely to sprints: sign up here.
• The next MidWest Developer Summit will be held at the Palantir.net offices in Chicago, IL, USA on August 12—15.

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!