First Release Candidate For Drupal 8 Now Available
The final release of Drupal 8 is drawing closer, as the first release candidate becomes available for users to tinker with.
Drupal is a widely popular open source platform, used and maintained by a community that's nearly 700,000 strong. During the 2014 CMS Awards, Drupal was named the People's Choice Best Enterprise PHP CMS.
There's no sign of a release date yet, though. Drupal have simply said that they will continue releasing release candidates twice a month until they are confident in the project's stability.
That's a fair stance to take, although I'm sure Drupal users are growing impatient. After all, Drupal 8 has been in development since 2011, with the first beta releasing over a year ago.
WYSIWYG Editing, Improved Mobile Support & More
Drupal 8 is going to bring web development closer to the average web user, thanks to a revamped user interface that boasts WYSIWYG and in-place editing.
“Significantly improved mobile support” is also on the cards, along with added and improved modules including Views, Date, and more. I suppose that means an easier ride for those making edits on smartphones and tablets.
Further enhancements include:
- New object-oriented backend leveraging Symfony components
- revamped configuration management
- improved multilingual support
Plus hundreds of other improvements, many of which are detailed here.
Ready for Action
According to the Drupal team, Drupal 8 in its current form is highly functional straight out of the box, and boasts many of the top Drupal 7 modules. They're confident that, for most standard website projects, Drupal 8 has everything needed built into its core already.
It'll be interesting to see how the final stages of Drupal 8 pan out. According to Drupal, there are no known issues with this latest version – as far as they know.
So, let's hope nobody finds anything major, enabling Drupal to get this show on the road for real, sooner rather than later.
The official announcement for this release candidate can be found here. Also, be sure to check out Drupal via our CMS directory.