Last week, we released Drupal 8.0.0! This amazing milestone signals a new era in Drupal core development, with changes to the changes allowed in patches and a new release cycle with minor versions scheduled every six months.

Now that Drupal 8 is ready for building real sites, with contributed projects already available or being built, the immediate focus for Drupal 8 core will be fixing bugs to help those real sites, as well as fixing any issues in Drupal core that prevent contributed modules from being ported to Drupal 8. Another top priority is stabilizing and completing the core Migrate feature and its user interface, so that existing Drupal 7 and especially Drupal 6 sites can move to Drupal 8 reliably. Finally, a third priority is adding frontend and performance testing to help us make changes more safely. For the next six weeks, we will mainly be committing patches that move us toward these three goals.

Then, after January 6, 2016, we will begin a broader feature development phase for innovations in 8.1.x, 8.2.x, and beyond, so long as we are able to resolve critical issues consistently and keep 8.1.x stable for a reliable scheduled minor release. Read more about the proposed development, beta, and release candidate phases for minor versions.

Drupal 8 core branches and the core issue workflow

Starting today, all patches that are accepted to core according to the priorities above will be committed first to the 8.1.x git branch (even when they are filed against 8.0.x-dev in the core issue queue). Patches that are eligible for patch releases will typically be immediately committed to 8.0.x as well. If we are close to a bugfix release window, the issue may be marked "Patch (to be ported)" and committed just after the bugfix release, to give ample time to catch any regressions or followups before each change is deployed to production sites.

Some patches will only be committed to 8.1.x (for example, if they are too disruptive for a patch release or if they make additions that are only allowed in minor releases). Keep in mind that the open feature development phase for 8.1.x has not started yet, so plan to work on general feature additions and BC-compatible API improvements after it does.

Note that for the time being, patch-release-eligible issues are still filed against 8.0.x-dev in the core issue queue and most 8.1.x issues are still postponed pending the open feature development phase. Later, we will update the core issue metadata and processes as we move into more extensive minor version development.