drupal 8.1.0-beta1

This is a beta release for the next feature release of Drupal 8. Betas are good testing targets for developers and site builders who are comfortable reporting (and where possible, fixing) their own bugs. Beta releases are not recommended for non-technical users, nor for production websites. More information on beta releases.

We expect to release a release candidate for 8.1.0 on April 6th, and 8.1.0 stable on April 20th.

This beta release provides new improvements and functionality without breaking backward compatibility (BC) for public APIs. Note that there may be changes in internal APIs and experimental modules that require updates to contributed and custom modules and themes per Drupal core's backwards compatibility and experimental module policies.

Translators should take note of the string changes since the last minor release. Developers can review the change records for this release.

The following important issues are also resolved in 8.1.0 (in addition to over 150 changes listed at the end of this post):

Third party library updates

• #2614682: Update JS lib: Modernizr to 3.3.1
• #2611816: Update to Symfony 2.8

New stable features and API improvements

The following new stable features and API improvements have been added to Drupal 8.1.0-beta1:

• Language of parts: Introduce a language toolbar button
  
• Enable browsers' (native) spell checker in CKEditor
  
• Rendered entity views field handler
  
• Allow image toolkit derivatives
  
• Stop excluding local ID and revision fields from HAL output
  
• Add back the ability for install profiles (or at least distros) to pre-select a language or modify the language-selection screen
  

Experimental modules

The following modules are considered experimental for this release. Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.

Migrate, Migrate Drupal, and Migrate Upgrade UI (alpha stability)

This release now provides an alpha-stability user interface for Drupal core migrations! Use these modules to migrate Drupal 6 or 7 sites onto Drupal 8. See the user guide on upgrading from Drupal 6 or 7 to Drupal 8 for more information.

Always back up your data before performing a migration, and be sure to take note of these outstanding issues:

• The Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 migration should be considered alpha stability, but may be suitable for upgrading many existing Drupal 6 sites with careful testing.
• The Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration is incomplete, but is suitable for developers who would like to help improve the migration, and can be used to test upgrades especially for simple Drupal 7 sites.
• There are planned improvements to the migration API which may be committed during the beta release to improve long-term stability. This may affect developers of custom migrations.
• Issues tagged Migrate critical are blockers for these modules being considered stable.

Drush support is still only available in the Drupal Upgrade contributed module, but the core UI now replaces the contributed module UI, and using the contributed module together with 8.1.x core may have unexpected results until it is updated.

BigPipe (alpha stability)

Provides an advanced implementation of Facebook's BigPipe page rendering strategy, leading to greatly improved perceived performance for pages with dynamic, personalized, or uncacheable content. See the BigPipe handbook page.

If you previously installed the BigPipe contributed module, you must uninstall and remove it before upgrading from Drupal 8.0.x to 8.1.x.

Inline Form Errors (alpha stability)

This provides a proof-of-concept for showing form errors inline. It has not changed significantly from 8.0.0. Be aware that this module has outstanding issues, some of which are significant.

Known issues

There are no known regressions in this release.

The following issues may affect people running Drupal 8.1.0 on specific hosting environments:

• Installs on php-fpm environments may see fatal errors on enabling modules, due to #2572293: Do not rebuild router in kernel.terminate.
• There is not yet per-commit testing for MySQL 5.7.9 or MariaDB 10.1.8 (both released October 2015), but there are no known issues with them. We intend to add per-commit testing on one of these databases in the future.
• Particular Apache configurations may have issues with serving public file assets. Issue: #2619250: Disabling -MultiViews in .htaccess can cause 500 errors
  

Search the issue queue for all known issues.

All changes since the last minor release

A full list of issues fixed in 8.1.x but not released in 8.0.x can be found in the issue tracker.