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. Here is a quick overview of some of the more interesting changes:

Just two weeks ago we launched our new format for guides, along with a landing page that presents our guides and topics on one page. This week we’re pleased to add 2 more new guides to the list: Introduction to Drupal and Learn Drupal 8. Both of these guides provide overviews that answer common questions and point you in the right direction to get started with Drupal.

If you've been following along with the Drupal core development cycle you might already know that new minor versions of Drupal 8 are released roughly every 6 months. We're happy to celebrate the release of Drupal 8.4 yesterday! Let's take a look at a few of the new features that have been added to this release.

We're very excited about this new series for Web Services in Drupal 8. It has been our most-requested topic and we got to work with Mateu Aguiló Bosch to write it. If you have been looking to work on a decoupled Drupal project, or just need to dive into web service APIs, this series will teach you the tools you need and how to create a solid API for your needs.

We're thankful to the volunteers around the world who support the community by running camps. We've partnered up with several of them as sponsors and to give away free Drupalize.Me memberships. Get yourself to one of these events and you can win a free month of Drupalize.Me! Here is a list of upcoming events where you can win a free membership in the next 2 months.

We are pleased to say that we have updated and added to the guides so that we now have a complete set of exam guides for Drupal 8 and 7.

Drupalize.Me is looking for Drupal specialists to help us create new tutorials. These are temporary, part-time contracts to create and/or update written tutorials on a specific Drupal (or Drupal-related) topic.

Here at Drupalize.Me we spend a lot of time looking at our company, poking at our policies and processes, and deliberately working to be a better company in the world. For the last 2 years, since we became our own company, we’ve talked about wanting to make our employee handbook public but hadn’t taken the time get it done. We review our handbook at least annually and as part of the 2017 review and update process, we decided to also make sure it was in shape for sharing it with anyone who wants to take a look. We’ve finally gotten the review and editing complete and we have made the handbook available on GitHub.

This week we're adding four new tutorials to the Web Services in Drupal 8 series detailing how to create, update, and delete entities using Drupal's JSON API.

In this series we introduce Docker, a container runtime that allows you to run pre-packed, sandboxed Linux applications anywhere. We'll start by running a single container on the command line, build up to running Drupal in Docker, cover how to build your own containers, and how to add Docker to your Drupal development workflow.

For a lot of developers, myself included, testing your Drupal code can be a bit of an afterthought. Today we're happy to announce the release of a series of tutorials that might change how you feel about that.

Our guide to Testing in Drupal 8 was largely written by Paul Mitchum. Paul (Mile23 on drupal.org) has done work on Drupal's continuous integration project, is an active core contributor, and is one of the maintainers of the Examples project among his other roles.

This set of tutorials starts with helping explain why testing is a good idea in the first place and then takes a look at the different types of tests that ship with Drupal core and the various frameworks that makes those tests possible. After that bit of groundwork orientation is done we'll learn how test files are organized in the Drupal codebase and how we can run existing tests using a few different methods. Once we know how to execute our test suite, we'll dig into implementation examples for functional and unit tests.

Since the release of Drupal 8, we've prioritized two main things: 1) getting Drupal 8 tutorials out to you as soon as we can, and 2) keeping our published Drupal 8 tutorials up-to-date. We've also introduced written tutorials. Written tutorials enable us to get tutorials out to you more quickly and are much much easier to keep up-to-date. But, we are still committed to producing video tutorials, when they make the most sense. What this means is that most of the time we'll release written tutorials as soon as they are ready and then add a video to it later.

So, without further ado, here's a bunch of new videos we've recently added to tutorials in our Web Services in Drupal 8 series!

Today we're releasing a fresh batch of Docker-related tutorials to our Drupal Development with Docker guide. From learning to "Dockerize" an existing project to setting up your Docker project for sharing with your team, these tutorials will help you level-up your development-with-Docker skills.

Forms are one of the primary means through which users interact with a web application. The Form API is how Drupal module developers create, update, and modify forms. Learn how to leverage the Form API in a custom module with this new batch of tutorials from Drupalize.Me.

We've just released a new free guide on our site, Drupal 8 User Guide in order to help our members—and anyone—with minimal existing knowledge of Drupal get started building something quickly. It's a re-publication of the one already available on Drupal.org, with the addition of embedded videos.

I want to share a little bit about why we choose to republish existing content instead of creating new materials, why we've opted to add video to the user guide, and why we're giving it all away for free.

The interest in creating decoupled/headless/API-first Drupal sites has been growing for a while. As the interest grows, and more sites are implementing this architecture, there is a growing list of articles and discussions about it. Drupal is a great backend for these kinds of sites, and React is the most popular JavaScript framework being used for frontends. While Drupal and React are both well-established technologies with a wealth of documentation, the interaction between the two, and best practices around that interaction, are still developing. We've pulled together the best resources we can find on a new site, React for Drupal.

In November 2017, Symfony released its latest major version: Symfony 4! That's great! Right? But what does this mean for Drupal? And more importantly, what does it mean for your Drupal projects?

There's been an ongoing discussion about the state of documentation on Drupal.org. Sparked by this blog post by Matthew Grasmick which examines Drupal's failure to provide easy-to-follow installation documentation. To which Dries responded suggesting that we consider how we might evolve Drupal's documentation leadership and governance. I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of the lessons learned helping with the Drupal 8 User Guide in order to move the conversation forward.

This week, we've published more tutorials for our Drupal Development with Docker series, a new video series from KnpUniversity that will get you up and running with Symfony 4, a brand new set of tutorials: Introduction to Composer for Drupal Users, and another Form API tutorial.