新年快樂 (Happy [Lunar] New Year)! Last week, the Drupal community converged on Bogotá, Colombia for DrupalCon Latin America 2015, and largely due to the pre– and post–DrupalCon sprints, the number of Drupal 8 critical issues has dropped to about 56! Also, all of the critical issues from the Drupal 8 core critical issues sprint at DrupalCamp NJ have been committed!

Some other highlights of the month were:

• Tobias Stöckler and Jibran Ijaz volunteered to become the Shortcut module maintainers, and Lewis Nyman volunteered to become the CSS maintainer.
• Webchick posted an excellent rundown of the remaining Drupal 8 critical issues on her personal blog.
• The functions drupal_pre_render_html(), module_invoke(), module_install(), module_uninstall(), module_implements(), and module_list() were removed.
• To improve user experience, autocomplete widgets for links and entities were added, and various pieces of user-interface text were made easier to understand.
• To improve developer experience, a \Drupal::hasContainer() function was added, Symfony session components can now be injected, and it became easier to swap session storage handlers.
• On the front-end, we made a lot of progress evicting crappy CSS, the pager component was rewritten (and now it's more intuitive for readers of right-to-left languages), and work continued moving classes from preprocess functions to templates.
• Simpletest memory limits were lowered and installer performance was improved.
• A bug causing stale field values to be kept indefinately was fixed.
• For views with multiple languages, entity and field language selection is now unified under one straightforward setting. More work is going on to render base fields with this system.

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. Webchick posted an excellent rundown of the remaining Drupal 8 critical issues on her personal blog which may also be helpful.

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

• The Oak Park Illinois Sprint is happening this weekend: Sunday, February 22nd. Everyone is welcome!
• Don't forget to submit your sessions for DrupalCamp Los Angeles before the deadline next week (February 27th)!
• Would you believe Drupal Dev Days Montpellier will already be over two months from today? Make sure to plan to come for the sprints, an amazing opportunity to learn from and work with top Drupal developers for several uninterrupted days. April 13-19.
• 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!