What's new with Drupal 8?

Happy New Year everyone! Since the last Drupal Core Update on December 3rd, Drupal 8 passed over 2500 contributors (congratulations to tadityar on becoming the 2500th D8 contributor on December 9)!

Some other highlights of the month were:

• To improve the user-experience, you can no longer install over a database, the Field UI was changed so adding a field is a separate task, the Views UI was changed to make it easier to see the Save button, and the Drupal installer was improved by merging the "Translate" and "Finish Translations" pages.
• On the front-end, field and html classes have been moved out of preprocess functions and into templates, Bartik's CSS has been SMACSS-ified, Seven got print styling, and the "Highlighted" region has been removed from Bartik.
• To improve testing and test-coverage, Field UI testing was simplified, a number of unit-test suites were expanded, and the effort to clean up variables and methods in test objects is making a lot of progress.
• To improve performance, node grants are now properly cached, static cache clearing was improved for renames and deletions, cache tags were decoupled from cache bins, and progress towards optimizing ajaxPageState for high-latency networks was made by forcing assets to be declared through the asset library system.
• To improve site-builder and developer experience, Drupal 8's composer.json has been moved into the core folder, so you can so you can use the composer.json in the webroot to manage dependencies for your project. And, some config schema changes were made, including requiring all TestBase derived tests to strictly conform to the schema, and a number of bugs were fixed as a result.
• The functions format_plural(), drupal_mail(), form_state_values_clean(), drupal_match_path(), drupal_truncate_bytes(), drupal_html_class(), drupal_clean_css_identifier(), menu_link_content_uninstall(), and views_get_applicable_views() were removed. So were \Drupal\entity_test\EntityTestViewsData, \Drupal\Core\Utility\Title, DrupalUnitTestBase (in favor of KernelTestBase), and text.data_types.schema.yml.
• A number of third-party libraries were updated: Symfony, domready, matchMedia, underscore.js, backbone.js, jQuery, jquery.cookie, Modernizr, and EasyRdf.
• Also, The Exception-Inception (Exception-ception?) bug, and a file-upload bug first reported in 2006 were fixed; Drupal's stream wrapper now works properly in PHP 5.4 and higher, and support for multi-value base fields was added.

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.

Drupal 8 In Real Life

• Global Sprint Weekend is coming to a city near you on January 17th and 18th! We're currently at 41 locations in 20 countries and counting!
• The Central New Jersey Drupal Meetup is having a Drupal 8 Core Critical Issues Sprint January 29th to February 1st. They plan to work on work on some of the remaining routing, menu link, and consensus banana issues.
• Drupal Developer Days will be happening April 13th through 19th in Montpellier, France. Don't forget to submit your sessions before January 31st! Calls for sponsors and scholarships are open too, don’t miss your chance!

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!