The first Drupal 8 release candidate is out and to quote Dries Buytaert: "It's time to start building!"
The day is finally here, this morning release candidate one of Drupal 8 was announced, it’s a long-awaited and exciting milestone for the Drupal community.
Work on Drupal 8 has been ongoing for about 5 years. It’s now time for the transition.
The release candidate is available now that the critical issues are down to zero.
So what’s new in Drupal 8?
Drupal 8 has some major enhancements and comes with a host of new and improved features including:
- Mobile
- Multilingual capabilities
- Configuration management
- Accessibility
- Built-in web services
- Effortless authoring
- Fun and Fast theming
- Views
- Industry-standard approach
- Field power
- Better markup
- Clear upgrade paths
Drupal 8 features a modern, industry-standard approach to application architecture, object-oriented code, the latest PHP standards and the best-of-breed external libraries. What this means is that Drupal and non-Drupal developers can embrace object-oriented programming and proven technologies from the larger PHP community.
Drupal 8 has a new theming system. Twig makes designing beautiful and functional Drupal sites easier than ever before, providing simplified template syntax and greater security.
All this and new features such as inline content editing, WYSIWYG editors and enhanced help, work together to provide a rich content manager experience. The Drupal community has also been very excited about the configuration management capabilities in Drupal 8.
But when is the full release?
This is the million-dollar question, and we're not sure yet.
drupal.org says:
“We will schedule an official release date for 8.0.0 when we are confident that the rate and nature of incoming critical bugs has slowed enough to ensure a stable release.”