Since the last Drupal Core Update on January 12th, the Drupal Association awarded the first round of the new D8 Accelerate grants; nominations for the Drupal Association Director at Large have opened (and there are already some candidates); and, in spite of the blizzard raging outside, the contributors at the Drupal 8 core critical issues sprint at DrupalCamp NJ fixed 12 critical issues, 4 major issues, plus moved another 7 criticals and 7 majors forward, and more in the Drupal 8 menu links system!

We're making excellent progress on Drupal 8! Core critical hours have been a great success and the number of critical issues is steadily falling:

Some other highlights of the month were:

• Drupal turned 14; and Joe Saylor posted the results of the recent community survey.
• The Drupal.org team posted the Drupal.org usage statistics for 2014.
• Amazee Labs launched their first Drupal 8 customer website!
• Pantheon hired long-time Drupal contributors Greg Anderson and Kate Klingman as dedictaed Open Source Contributors!
• The Promoted to front page and Sticky at top of lists checkboxes and their descriptions were re-worded to be less-technical and easier to understand.
• On the front-end, breadcrumbs were removed from the page template and put into a block, linking to a file from a Twig template was made easier, and HTML classes were moved from preprocess functions into templates.
• On the back-end, format_plural() was removed, and comments now use entity validation.
• On and off the island, a number of third-party libraries were updated: Symfony, CKEditor, PHPUnit, jQuery UI, html5shiv, normalize.css and jQuery Touch Punch; and it became easier to install Drupal to the correct folder with Composer.
• On the performance front, Route enhancers are now run lazily, page caching code was moved to the middleware, and drupalSettings.ajaxPageState was optimized.
• Sascha Grossenbacher (Berdir) made a script that run tests on all the contributed modules with D8 branches and testing enabled and displays the results.

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.

Even if you're not yet familiar with Drupal 8's code, we need people with Drupal 7 skills to make changes to Drupal.org's infrastructure and fix contribution barriers so that Drupal.org is ready for Drupal 8's release. Check out the meeting notes for more information.

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

Drupal 8 In Real Life

• DrupalCon Latin America 2015 is coming up fast! It starts on February 10th! If you're looking to buy a ticket, you need to do so before February 8th if you want to take advantage of regular ticket pricing! The price goes up USD$36 if you wait to buy your tickets at the door!
• The MidWest Developers Summit is happening on August 12—15. More details later this year.

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!