Drupal 8.4 is Coming Soon

Today the release candidate (rc) for Drupal 8.4 came out. This is the final review stage for the next version and a good opportunity to see what changes are coming when the new release goes public in fewer than 4 weeks, on October 4th. (See the full release schedule.) There are definitely some important things to note in this release. You can read the full list of goodies in the release notes for the original, alpha release and the newest 8.4.0-rc1 release notes for this rc. Here we highlight some of the more interesting changes. We'll get into more details about the new version in October, but you should start getting excited now.

• Five(!) modules moved from experimental status to full, stable status in 8.4. That's a bunch of cool new tools in core! (Note that Content Moderation is still experimental, but it is very close to stable. The core dev team is still working very hard to get it moved to stable for the 8.4 release.) Our new stable modules are:
  • Workflows
  • Layout Discovery
  • DateTime Range
  • Inline Form Errors
  • Media (which is stable, but hidden in the UI for now)
• Symfony has been updated to 3.2 (learn more about Symfony)
• jQuery updated to version 3 and jQuery UI to 1.12 (learn more about JavaScript in Drupal)
• Adoption of new, stricter coding standards for JavaScript (learn more about Drupal Coding Standards)
• Internet Explorer 9 and 10 support dropped
• More improvements to the Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI experimental modules, but they are still at alpha stability.

For Drush users, note that versions earlier than 8.1.12 will not work with Drupal 8.4. To avoid fatal errors you will need to update Drush to 8.1.12 before using it to update to Drupal 8.4.

We are in our final tutorial review and update process, so you can expect our Drupal 8 tutorials to be correct once the new release comes out. You can always double-check the status of our tutorial compatibility by looking for the Drupal version check mark.