What's new with Drupal 8?

It's been three weeks since our last 'This week in core' post, but with holidays providing a welcome break for many, core development has continued at its usual rapid pace. Time flies! The session submission deadline for Drupal Dev Days Szeged is just around the corner on the 15th of January.

Give Drupal a birthday present

Next week is Drupal's 13th birthday! Want to give Drupal a birthday present? Why not tackle an issue, or help mentor someone else to do so. There's also a Reddit AMA appearance by Dries (that's Ask me anything for those who don't use Reddit - I had to look it up) and we're also planning a special "This Year in Drupal Core".

New Drupal core commit schedule

We're trying out a new commit schedule to increase core momentum. For one week starting January 15 up until the release of Drupal 8.0-alpha8 on January 22, core maintainers will commit only critical and major patches. (Normal and minor patches will be committed again starting January 23.) Read more about the new commit schedule.

Where's Drupal 8 at in terms of release?

Last week, we fixed 11 critical issues and 14 major issues, and opened 9 criticals and 11 majors. That puts us overall at 135 release-blocking critical issues and 482 major issues.

10 beta-blocking issues were fixed last week. There are still 61 of 98 beta blockers that must be resolved and 48 change records that must be written before we can release a Drupal 8 beta.

Where can I help?

Top criticals to hit this week

Each week, we check with core maintainers and contributors for the "extra critical" criticals that are blocking other work. These issues are often tough problems with a long history. If you're familiar with the problem space of one of these issues and have the time to dig in, help drive it forward by reviewing, improving, and testing its patch, and by making sure the issue's summary is up to date and any API changes are documented.

More ways to help

If core's toughest criticals aren't on your to-do list this week, there are lots of other places to jump in and help with conversions and cleanups in core. The Drupal 8 "meta meta", compiled by vijaycs85, is a great place to start if you want to dig your teeth into a technical problem but aren't sure where to start. Or if coding isn't your thing, there are plenty of issues tagged as Needs change notification. Writing these is a great way to keep abreast of recent changes - see more on change records to get started.

Additionally:

The CMI initiative are planning to hold biweekly meetings to gain momentum around the remaining critical issues

As always, if you're new to contributing to core, check out Core contribution mentoring hours. Twice per week, you can log into IRC and helpful Drupal core mentors will get you set up with answers to any of your questions, plus provide some useful issues to work on.

Notable Commits

The best of git log --after=2013-12-19 --pretty=oneline (192 commits in total!):

#2005716 by tim.plunkett, msonnabaum, dawehner, alexpott, effulgentsia: Promote EntityType to a domain object - this moves much of the entity type annotation/info to a first-class object. The existing entity type info/annotation was a large array with seemingly arbitrary keys. Much of the code had isset checks to see if a particular array key exists. This makes entity type an object with methods for retrieving the various information.

#2098119 by beejeebus, alexpott, chx: Replace config context system with baked-in locale support and single-event based overrides. As the name suggests this bakes locale support into the config system and removes the config context system. Modules wishing to change config based on other non-locale based circumstances (eg domain module) can subscribe to an event and react accordingly.

Issue #2130811 by by alexpott, Gábor Hojtsy, vijaycs85, sun, Wim Leers: Use config schema in saving and validating configuration form to ensure data is consistent and correct. This ensures that configuration is in the correct format, as defined in the schema, before the config files are written, eg integers are cast from text etc.

Issue #2042807 by tim.plunkett, pwolanin, ianthomas_uk, jhodgdon: Convert search plugins to use a ConfigEntity and a PluginBag. One of the last plugin conversions and an important blocker of other criticals.

Issue #2068471 by dawehner, Crell, tim.plunkett, jibran, fubhy, larowlan: Normalize Controller/View-listener behavior with a Page object. This sets the stage for the last push to finish up WSCCI (the Web Services initiative) and for SCOTCH (the Blocks and Layouts initiative) to be completed in contrib.

You can also always check the Change records for Drupal core for the full list of Drupal 8 API changes from Drupal 7.

Drupal 8 Around the Interwebs

Blog posts about Drupal 8 and how much it's going to rock your face.

Drupal 8 in "Real Life"

Whew! That's a wrap!