drupal 8

Greetings, folks! As we head into feature freeze for Drupal 8.6 (the week of July 18), here's a run-down of the various initiatives, and a hit-list of what they're trying to accomplish in the next two weeks. Patch reviews, testing, design, docs, and many more skills are very welcomed!

A couple of caveats here:

1) This is my own personal best understanding of where this stuff is all at, based on reading issue comments, attending meetings, overhearing things from other people who attended meetings, catching the odd Slack snippet of conversation, carrier piegon, etc. And therefore may not be 100% accurate, or even 80% accurate — there's a lot going on! (please clarify in the comments if you see any errors/omissions)
2) Just because something is listed here, there is absolutely no guarantee that it gets reviewed + (truly) RTBCed + committed in time for feature freeze and makes it into 8.6. As you can see, there are lots of issues in the list below, and we're all doing our best to stay on top of them. Worst-case, there's always 8.7. :)
3) This post gets into nitty-gritty "technical audience" details; if you're interested in a more broad overview of initiatives and their aims for 8.6 and beyond, there's the strategic initiatives overview on Drupal.org. I was also recently on a Lullbabot podcast to that effect.

OK, here we go! These are listed in alphabetical order.

Hopefully you've heard the news about the Drupal Association's new D8 Accelerate grants program, and the fundraising drive we have currently going on. If not, the gist is that the Drupal Association has created a central fund, managed by the Drupal core committers, to fund both "bottom-up" community grants for things like targeted sprints or "bug bounties," as well as "top-down" spending driven from the core committers on larger strategic initiatives that help accelerate Drupal 8's release. All D8 Accelerate grants that are provided are tracked centrally at https://assoc.drupal.org/d8accelerate/awarded, including what the money was used for, how much was spent, to whom it went, and a report from the grant recipient(s) that outlines the work that was accomplished.

However, it can be a little hard to parse from that format the larger meaning/context of this work, especially if you don't spend upwards of 30 hours per week in the core queue like most of these folks. :) As Chief Wearer of Many Hats™, I sit on both the Drupal Association board as well as the committee who manages these funds. This puts me in a good position to provide a bit of "behind the scenes" info on how the funding process works, as well as provide some of the larger story of how these funds are benefitting not only Drupal 8 core, but the larger Drupal ecosystem.

I've seen some Drupal module developers out there have a lot of trepidation about moving to Drupal 8, most often via hearsay from others or via occasionally dipping in to look around and being spooked by newfangeldy stuff like namespaces, object-oriented code, and weird directory structures.

The Spark distribution is a Drupal 7 distribution which aims to prototype cutting-edge authoring experience improvements that we hope to propose for inclusion in Drupal 8 core, announced back in May. Please download the latest release and check it out, and give us lots of feedback! (And/or patches! ;))

Here are some notes from the Drupal 8 status update talk that Dries and I gave today to the Acquia team, since this seemed like useful info for the community to know as well. :) It covers both process changes for addressing previous issues that arose in Drupal 7, as well as a status update on Drupal 8 progress to-date. This could be useful to folks who have been wondering where all of the various Drupal 8 status updates fit into the "bigger" picture.

Please comment here if I left anything out, or messed up anything.