Now that Drupal 8.3 is in beta, it is time to look at progress around core initiatives again and see how you can help move one or more of them forward. Once again I asked initiative contributors to help compile this post to inform you all of progress across the board. This is just a sampling of some improvements, there are a lot more that we could not cover here.

Default content and new core theme

The default content and new core theme teams decided to join forces because the goals are intertwined. The teams found it hard to demonstrate good default content without a supporting visual look and vice versa. The plan to go with a farmer's market site changed to a more general publication site, but that still allows for plenty of things to showcase. We are looking for a designer / art director for the project (deadline today!).

Use the Slack channel if you want to help or if you just want to follow our progress. Get an invite at https://drupaltwig-slack.herokuapp.com/.

Media

The media team held a sprint in Berlin in December. Unfortunately none of these media improvements landed in Drupal 8.3, however we are very close to complete the base media functionality early in Drupal 8.4. There was significant progress on the visual media library too. Next step is to finalise the plugins for images, documents and oEmbed.

Join in the #drupal-media channel on IRC.

Migrate

The Migrate API became beta in Drupal 8.2.x with 8.2.5 and will apply to 8.3.0 as well. On the other hand other parts of the migration system like the Migrate Drupal API are still alpha stability and received some big updates. Two huge additions are the migration path for Drupal 7 node translations to Drupal 8 content translation and support added for configuration translations (and implemented initially for user profile fields).

Join in the #drupal-migrate channel on IRC.

Multilingual

Most of the recent progress on the multilingual initiative was in collaboration with the migration team and that is still heavily ongoing. Further feature development around multilingual features is not on the table currently, as most contributors moved on to more pressing areas given the advances achieved in multilingual with Drupal 8 already. Therefore it is being proposed to officially remove the multilingual initiative from the list.

PHPUnit

The work in the PHPUnit initiative is focusing on converting a large part of old Simpletest web tests to PHPUnit based browser tests. The goal is to commit a larger patch on February 21st to the Drupal 8.3.x branch. After that one third of Drupal core’s web tests would be converted to PHPUnit browser tests. We are also discussing the timeline for deprecating Simpletest.

We are also working on improving our JavaScript browser tests in multiple issues. For documentation there is also a Javascript browser test tutorial now!

If you want to convert your tests in your contrib / custom module, please read the PHPUnit browser test tutorial and help out on https://www.drupal.org/node/2794285 in case you run into problems. Please follow the PHPUnit initiative issue for status updates. Join us in IRC in #drupal-phpunit.

(This update written by klausi & dawehner)

Workflow

The biggest user facing change with workflows since the last update is the introduction of the Workflows module as a separate concept from content moderation. Now other modules can use workflows for user levels, commerce and other needs as well, when the workflow has nothing to do with content moderation. Many API changes were also made including support for moderation of non-translatable entity types and entity types without bundles (as long as revisions are enabled). Publishing entities implementing EntityPublishedInterface is also possible now, not just nodes.

Wondering how to join an initiative? Meeting information for each initiative is listed at https://groups.drupal.org/node/514585