Since the last Drupal Core Update, the Seventh Beta of Drupal 8.0 was released (and Drush 7.0.0-alpha9 was released to coincide with it), and Mink and Goutte were added to core to support behavioural testing!

Some other highlights of the month were:

• Testing: tests were added to more-thoroughly test our SimpleTest testing system, and more kernel-based testing was converted to unit tests to improve performance.
• Alex Pott refuted the rumor that Drupal 8 is designed only for big enterprise-level sites.
• global $user is no more; drupal_is_front_page(), SessionManager::enable(), SessionManager::disable(), and SessionManager::isEnabled(), the file_htaccess_lines() wrapper, and _update_refresh() were all removed.
• Cheppers started a blog series about their experience rebuilding their own website in Drupal 8.
• To improve performance, parameter-dependent cache contexts were added, the classloader was changed to only search after drupal_classloader() is called, and the book navigation cache key is no longer hardcoded.
• Dries wrote an article on some of the changes to caching in Drupal 8, and Daniel Sipos explained the Drupal 8 Cache API in more depth.
• On the front end, String::format()'s '@' and '%' placeholders are now auto-escaped, the "skip-link" and "Featured-top" components were cleaned up in Bartik, secondary tab flow behavior was fixed in Bartik, and dropdown action lists were made more robust.
• lakshminp wrote a series of tutorials on the Drupal 8 plugin system, Joe Shindelar posted on responding to events in Drupal 8, Rakesh James explained how to use Views Exposed Filters in Drupal 8 and how to export REST web services in Drupal 8, Sven Berg Ryen explained how to install Drush 7 without throwing away Drush 6, and Greg Anderson explained how to avoid double-escaped markup in Drupal 8.
• react/promise was updated, and our eslint config was improved.
• A bug where concurrent node edits leaked through previews, potentially causing data loss was fixed.
• Some consistency/sanity was brought into Field UI routes and forms.
• Andrei Jechiu at Propeople outlined what a content staging solution for Drupal 8 might look like.

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

• DrupalSouth Melbourne is happening March 5—7 at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, featuring sprinting and lots of speakers.
• DrupalCamp Hyderabad will be on March 7th and 8th in Hyderabad, Telangana, India.
• DrupalCamp China will be held on March 14th in the famous Pudong district of Shanghai, China, featuring a session on open-source e-commerce by Ryan Szrama, VP of Community Development at Commerce Guys.
• European Drupal Days will be March 19—21 in Milan, Italy. The 19th will have sessions on Drupal 8 theming, the future of commerce in Drupal 8, #d8rules; the 20th will have workshops on continuous integration, Symfony, dependency injection and theming, and the 21st will be lots of sprinting!
• MidCamp is coming up on March 19—22 at the University of Illinois in Chicago, Illinois, USA. There will be training, speakers, and lots of sprinting! Tickets are still available, but hurry before they're sold out!

Also, don't forget to vote for your Drupal Association Community Director — voting is open March 9th through 20th!

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!