Since the last Drupal 8 Core Update, DrupalCon Los Angeles took place, the proposed organizational structure for the Drupal project was approved and MAINTAINERS.txt was updated to reflect this (although it still needs to be updated in the Drupal 7 branch), and the Drupal Association announced updates to their 2015 financial plan.
What's new with Drupal 8?
Drupal 8.0.0-beta11 and 8.0.0-beta12 were released, a new category for issues, plan, was added to categorize meta issues, the Drupal 8 Security bug bounty program was launched, Angie "webchick" Byron analyzed Drupal major version adoption and walked us through the new DrupalCI testing infrastructure, hook_update_N() became required for core patches that introduce data model changes, the number of outstanding criticals was reduced to a new all-time low of 15, and for a while, every single critical was RTBC or being addressed!
Some other highlights of the month were:
Weber Macedo became a maintainer of core's Link module; Kay Leung became a core JavaScript maintainer; Jelle Sebreghts became a maintainer of core's Responsive Image module; Matthew Donadio became a maintainer of the DateTime module; David Hernandez and Morten Birch Heide-Jørgensen became maintainers for the Classy theme; and Daniel Wehner and Peter Wolanin became Menu subsystem maintainers.
Matthew Tift at Lullabot talked about the culture of Drupal and how Drupal is for everyone, and Jingsheng Wang wrote about the state of Drupal in China.
To improve usability, form errors now appear next to the form element, the "Messages" region in page templates was renamed to "Highlighted", users can now quickedit image and date fields, and one-time login link failures are reported as errors instead of status messages.
Yannis Karampelas at Netstudio wrote an overview of the most-exciting features in Drupal 8, Heidi Wong at Acquia explained how to build an awesome Drupal 8 development team, our fearless leader Dries delivered his semi-annual Driesnote on the history of Drupal and how it is scaling, the Documentation Working Group proposed creating a Drupal 8 Manual, and Jerome Zech at MD Systems announced the full launch of the first news portal based on Drupal 8.
On the front-end, the formUpdated JS event now triggers on backspace, delete, copy/paste, and CJK-input, class names required for JavaScript are being prefixed with js-, Seven's primary tabs look better on small screens, date inputs now use the HTML5 date element if possible, and we started documenting Drupal's JavaScript using JSDoc.
Amy Vaillancourt-Sals at ThinkShout shared the story of how she got her first commit (live-committed) into core, John Hannah at Lullabot wrote about the fundamentals of Drupal 8 theming, Jess (xjm) explained what happens at Critical Burndown sprints, yours truly at OpenConcept Consulting Inc. detailed how I generate patches and interdiffs, and Joe Haskins at Trellon, LLC wrote about the proposed changes to the Drupal project applications process.
To improve performance, caching was added for fully-rendered menu trees, CSS/JS asset resolution, path processing and route matching. Also, configuration entity lookups, field map rebuilds, and toolbar_pre_render() were optimized, the time needed to rebuild the theme registry was reduced by 85%, views using pagers can now specify a cache context, and Views no longer uses it's own internal caching mechanism.
Rakesh James at Red Crackle explained how to add contextual filters to D8 views, Greg Anderson at Pantheon proposed a configuration workflow for Drupal 8 sites, and Kristof Van Tomme at Pronovix reported on the first batch of Drupal 8 module upgrade reports.
Some notable bugs were fixed, including page caching breaking user registrations, changes to services no longer causes fatal errors, deleting an entity translation no longer deletes the whole entity, and the MySQL driver now supports full UTF-8.
Daniel Sipos explained how to add tags to the HTML <head> in Drupal 8, how AJAX forms work in D8, how to add pseudo-fields in Drupal 8, and how to use ThirdPartySettingsInterface to add custom data on config entities. Ben Dougherty at Code Drop talked about Creating Custom Config Entities, Mark Ferree at Chapter Three showed us how to test D8 with Travis CI, and Alex Pott at Chapter Three explained configuration dependencies.
On the development side, configuration dependencies are validated before importing; Views now properly integrates with datetime fields; it's now possible to automatically create content when importing configuration; PasswordInterface and UserInterface were decoupled, as were CMI and migration templates; the format_xml_elements() function was removed; the symfony/console and symfony/psr-http-message-bridge components were added; we upgraded to use Symfony 2.7.0; and we decided on a Composer package naming convention.
To improve security, the vendor directory is no longer web-accessible, changing a user's e-mail address will invalidate any active one-time login links, changing a user's password will invalidate all other active sessions, and a blanket clickjacking defense was added to core.
How can I help get Drupal 8 finished?
See Help get Drupal 8 released! for updated information on the current state of the software 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
NYC Camp 2015 will be held July 16–19 in New York City, NY, USA. It's not a Drupal-specific camp, but there are a lot of Drupal sessions, and there will be sprints the entire week!
Drupal GovCon 2015 will be held July 22–24 in Bethesda, MD, USA, featuring both core and contrib sprints, and extended sprints after the conference. Don't forget to sign up for the sprints!
DrupalCamp North (not to be confused with DrupalNorth) will be held in Tavistock Place, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, England on July 24–26. Sprints run July 22–24, but you must preregister for the sprint.
DrupalCamp Ottawa will be July 24 in Ottawa, ON, Canada. The event is free, but you should register if you want to attend.
Drupal Camp Costa Rica will be July 29–31 in San Pedro Montes de Oca, San José, Costa Rica.
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!