Nine months ago, I was given the opportunity to work full-time on creating a new distribution for Drupal 8. I was also lucky enough to be granted a full-time developer to help me. (Incidentally, that developer turned out to be the most competent and creative php developer I've had the pleasure to work with. Seriously, look at his array_merge_canadian function and the hook_update_n magic he did for delicately updating our Landing page content type. Thanks phenaproxima!)

Our original goal was to "enable site builders to create great authoring experiences". BADCamp 2015, where we attempted to define user stories to that end (with the help of some of the brightest minds in Drupal) seems like a distant memory. Since then, we've been sidetracked by secondary goals like best-practice documentation, managing our issue queue, extending distributions, and update paths. The most edifying sidetrack, however, has almost definitely been Composer and defining what we think was the best way to build, deploy, and manage a modern Drupal application.

We reached GA in late June and have officially announced this milestone today. The road to get there has reconfirmed my love for the Drupal Community :) Thanks EVERYONE.

We have plenty of things in our roadmap/issue queue... from bug fixes, to enhancements, to major feature additions (WPS). I'm looking forward to the next year.

For now, here is the official Lightning Press Release. Thanks so much everybody!

Acquia Releases Lightning for Drupal 8, Enabling Fast Starts for Digital Experience Deployments [July 19, 2016]