drupal 8.2.0-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.

This minor 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. Both policies have been updated for the 8.1.x release.

This beta release includes the feature and API additions below. A handful of additional beta target issues are being considered for a later beta, including an experimental content moderation module, a sidebar for configuring site elements in place, a new date range field type, and a couple CKEditor enhancements.

New stable features

The following new stable features have been added to Drupal 8.2.0-beta1:

• #2688945: Allow removing a module's content entities prior to module uninstallation
• #2627678: The comment view mode can be configured in the formatter form
• #2490136: Enable revisions by default
• #306662: Add redirect option to site-wide contact forms

Usability improvements

• #2513402: Any time a user creates a thing and saves, display a link to the thing created in the status.
• #2090937: Seven theme: style CKEditor-native dialogs to match Drupal-native dialogs

In addition to the new features listed above, 8.2.0-beta1 includes many small user interface enhancements for usability, especially related to user interface text and form buttons.

REST and API-first improvements

Drupal 8.2.0-beta1 significantly improves REST and API-first support with the following new features, API and developer experience improvements, and bug fixes.

• #2662284: Return complete entity after successful PATCH
• #2724823: Config entities readable via REST: GET support
• #2721595: Simplify REST configuration
• #2403307: RPC endpoints for user authentication: log in, check login status, log out
• #1869548: Opt-in Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) support
• #2228141: Add authentication support to REST views
• #2308745: Remove rest.settings.yml, use rest_resource config entities
• #2659070: REST requests without Content-Type header: unhelpful response significantly hinders DX, should receive a 415 response
• #2631774: Impossible to update Comment entity with REST (HTTP PATCH): bundle field not allowed to be updated, but EntityNormalizer::denormalize() requires it
• #2310307: File needs CRUD permissions to make REST work on entity/file/{id}
• #2419825: Make serialization_class optional

Other API improvements

Modules requiring Drupal 8.2.0-beta1 or later can take advantage of these additional API improvements:

• #2753681: Move CSRF header token out of REST module so that user module can use it, as well as any contrib module
• #2384459: Add entity query condition for delta in EFQ
• #2753475: Support using the values of another field as initial values when adding a new field
• #2348137: Enable WAL journal mode by default for SQLite database
• #2723393: BlockContent entity has revision_user and revision_created fields, and implements RevisionLogInterface
• #2770845: A collection route is automatically provided for custom entity types
• #1920902: Add a Drupal Yaml wrapper so we can default to PECL Yaml component if it is available

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)

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 is now complete and can be used for migrating Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 8 (now including migrations for core node translations!), but some changes may still be needed as the Migrate API itself is not yet fully stable.
• 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. (Outstanding issues for the Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration)
• Issues tagged Migrate critical are blockers for these modules being considered stable.

Drush support is currently only available in the Drupal Upgrade contributed module.

BigPipe (alpha stability, nearing beta)

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.

Place Block (alpha stability)

This new 8.2.x feature allows the user to place a block on any page and see the region where it will be displayed, without having to navigate to a backend administration form.

Inline Form Errors (alpha stability)

This provides a proof-of-concept for showing form errors inline for improved accessibility. This module has outstanding issues, some of which are significant, and may be removed from core in 8.3.x if the issues are not resolved within the next six months.

Third-party library updates

• #2700741: Update jQuery 2.2.3
• #2721351: Upgrade to Twig 1.24
• #1869548: Added Cross-origin resource sharing library and stack middleware (asm89/stack-cors)
• #2712633: Update symfony-cmf/routing to 1.4.0
• #2712637: Update stack/builder for Symfony 3 compatibility

Changed coding standards

Drupal 8.2.0-beta1 has adopted the following coding standards changes:

• #2333243: Relax .gitattributes global rule
• #2648050: [policy, no patch] Stop disallowing camelCase for local variables / parameters
• #2248463: Require a blank line after <?php

Other important issues

Translators should take note of a handful of minor string changes since the last release.

The following important issues are resolved in 8.2.0-beta1 (in addition to the dozens of other fixes listed at the end of this post):

• #2699613: Set a shorter TTL for 404 responses in page_cache module
• #88183: Relative URLs in feeds should be converted to absolute ones

Known issues

• #2466197: Staging directory should not have to be writeable. was missing logic to create the sync directory in the installer if permissions were capable of doing so. This has been fixed in #2783749: [regression] Config directories should be created by installer if present in setings.php and if possible. The solution is to either use the 8.1.x-dev release, or upgrade to the next patch release (e.g. 8.1.9 or 8.2.0-beta2).

The following issues may affect people running Drupal 8.2.0-beta1 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

See the Drupal 8.2.x issue queue.