What's new with Drupal 8?

Since the last Drupal Core Update, the Drupal community has reduced the number of D8 critical issues to 45, and managed to keep the number of critical issues on one page since we hit 50 criticals on March 6th! We've also changed the behavior of the "admin role" setting so that any user with the "admin role" passes all permission checks automatically (like the superuser); added HTML5-lib to core so that HTML5 can be parsed properly; and fixed a bug preventing all PHPUnit tests from running.

Also, after a few months of work, the Technical Working Group, Drupal.org Software Working Group, Security Working Group, and frequent project application reviewers presented their proposed changes to the project application review process. They're looking for your feedback, so please read their proposal and leave your thoughts!

Some other highlights of the month were:

• Moshe Weitzman and Greg Anderson announced that Drush 7 will get a release every time Drupal 8.0 gets a new beta or release candidate, to make it easier to work with the latest beta.
• xjm performed a detailed analysis of contibution and influence in Drupal 8.
• To improve user experience, field types are now grouped by category.
• Josh Taylor detailed how to automatically test contrib modules when Drupal 8 updates.
• On the front end, the $messages page element was converted into a block, a filter to render render-arrays was added to Twig, views base fields are now rendered like Field UI fields; the button, skip link, and comment components now follow CSS standards; and menu classes were added back.
• Sujith Nara wrote an overview of all the caching methods available in Drupal 8.
• To improve performance, getting fresh entity and field definitions no longer invalidates all caches, views exposed filter forms no longer cause cache tables to grow exponentially, views now sets cache tags on it's render arrays, views can now cache base tables and entity types, routes are now rebuilt on write; and the unused block_plugin cache tags were removed.
• Daniel Sipos wrote a tutorial on creating custom field formatters in Drupal 8.
• To improve developer experience, developers can enable an X-Drupal-Cache-Contexts HTML header to list cache tags, and entities and fields can now report which language their content is in.
• Amber Matz wrote an excellent article explaining dependency injection using real-world examples.
• Lee Rowlands explained the tradeoffs of using the Events system versus Alter hooks in Drupal 8.
• The procedural functions drupal_bootstrap(), drupal_get_bootstrap_phase(), language_load(), language_list(), language_default(), drupal_theme_access(), drupal_html_id(), node_type_load(), node_type_get_types(), entity_load('node_type'), entity_load_multiple('node_type'), request_uri(), system_rebuild_theme_data(), and entity_load_by_uuid() were all removed, as was the html => TRUE option to l() and the $script_path global variable.

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

Voting in the Drupal Association's 2015 At-Large Board Elections ends Friday, so this is your last chance to make your voice heard! Anyone with a Drupal.org account that was created before the time nominations opened (January 31, 2015), and who has logged in at least once in the past year is allowed to vote, even if they are not a member of the Drupal Association!

Some other events happening in the coming weeks are:

• MidCamp starts tomorrow (March 19th) and runs until March 22nd at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Illinois, USA.
• DrupalCamp New Orleans will be on March 28th in New Orleans, LA, USA.
• Stanford Drupal Camp 2015 in Stanford, CA, USA will be on April 10th and 11th.
• 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!
• In case you missed it, DrupalCamp Ottawa has been postponed to summer 2015.

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!