important security fixes. Update: The latest Drupal 8 beta release is available with

Drupal 8.0.0-beta1 has just been released for testing and feedback! This key milestone is the work of over 2,300 people who have contributed more than 11,500 committed patches to 15 alpha releases, and especially the 234 contributors who fixed 177 "beta blocker" issues. To read about the new features in Drupal 8, see Drupal.org's Drupal 8 landing page.

Drupal 8 beta 1 for testers

Betas are good testing targets for developers and site builders who are comfortable reporting (and where possible, fixing) their own bugs, and who are prepared to rebuild their test sites from scratch if necessary. Beta releases are not recommended for non-technical users, nor for production websites.

Start by downloading Drupal 8.0.0-beta 1 and installing it! Drupal 8 definitely still has bugs, and we need your help to discover them. Let us know what bugs you find in the Drupal core issue queue. (Please search the known issues before filing.)

Drupal 8 beta 1 for module and core developers

The main differences between the previous Drupal 8 alphas and the new beta are:

The fundamental APIs in Drupal 8 (like the entity, configuration, and menu APIs) are now stable enough so that contributed module and theme authors can start (or resume) their #D8CX pledges and port their projects to Drupal 8.

We have locked down Drupal 8's data model enough that developers should generally not need to perform data migrations between beta releases of Drupal 8. We will start providing a beta-to-beta upgrade path in a later beta release.

Limited API and data model changes will still happen, though core maintainers will try to isolate these changes to only non-fundamental APIs or critical bug fixes.

We need your help to fix critical bugs by reviewing patches and creating patches.

If you're new to core development, check out Core contribution mentoring, a twice-weekly IRC meeting where you can get one-on-one help getting set up and finding a Drupal 8 task.

Drupal 8 beta 1 for designers, translators, and documentation writers

Drupal 8's user interface, interface text, and markup are not finalized until the first release candidate, so it's too early to focus on user-facing documentation, translations, or themes (though by all means, adventurous contributors should start now to provide feedback while we can still fix things). Note that localize.drupal.org does not yet support the full Drupal 8 API and does not have all translatable strings.

When does 8.0.0 get released?

Beta 1 will be followed by a series of additional beta releases with bug fixes, performance improvements, and improved stability.

The release version of Drupal 8.0.0 will be ready after there are no more critical issues (as of today, there are 97 remaining) and we've had at least one release candidate (RC) without adding any more critical issues to the list.

When will that be? "When it's ready." The more people help, the faster we can find and fix bugs, and the faster 8.0.0 gets released. The faster 8.0.0 gets released, the faster we can start adding new features for Drupal 8.1.0. So help out where you can, and let's deliver the best release of Drupal ever! :)

Thank you!

A massive thank-you to everyone who helped get Drupal 8 beta 1 done, especially the contributors who have focused on beta-blocking issues (pictured below).