drupal 8.3.0-alpha1

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To start a new Drupal project with version 8.3.0-alpha1@alpha:

To update your site and all dependencies to the latest version of Drupal:

To update your site to this specific release:

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Download drupal-8.3.0-alpha1.tar.gztar.gz 11.68 MB

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Download drupal-8.3.0-alpha1.zipzip 19.65 MB

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Release notes

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

This release includes the feature and API additions below.

New stable features

The BigPipe module has become stable in 8.3.0. This module 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

Improved authoring features

Improved site administration experience

REST and API-first improvements

Drupal 8.3.0-alpha1 significantly improves REST and API-first support with the following new features, API and developer experience improvements, and bug fixes.

#2291055: REST API now supports the registering of users.
#2807501: Anonymous REST API performance increased by 60% by utilizing the internal page cache.
Improved the response bodies and status codes for requests with incorrect request headers or request bodies, in dozens of situations.
#2737719: Massive overhaul of the test coverage
#2808233: 403 responses now return reason why access was denied

Improved performance and scalability

Other API improvements

Modules requiring Drupal 8.3.0-alpha1 or later can take advantage of these additional API improvements:

#2810303: Various variations of routers merged into either AccessAwareRouter or DynamicRouter to simplify the routing system.
#2721179: Replaced the deprecated Symfony ExecutionContextInterface for better Symfony compatibility
#2789315: EntityPublishedInterface and #2810381: EntityPublishedTrait have been added to give a #2812811: generic publishing API, and are being used by Node and Comment entity types.
#2809227: A new property originalRevisionId has been added to revisionable entities to store the old revision ID after it was updated.

Testing improvements

#2809117: Integrated PHPUnit verbose output in SimpleTest UI.
Improved backward compatibility between BrowserTestBase and WebTestBase.
Expanded automated test coverage for JavaScript.

New experimental modules

Experimental modules are provided with Drupal core for testing purposes, but are not yet fully supported.

Workflows (alpha stability): This module abstracts the transitions and states system from Content Moderation into a separate component so that it can be reused by other modules that implement non-publishing workflows.
Layout Discovery (alpha stability): Provides an API for modules or themes to register layouts. See the layout roadmap for the next steps for this module.
Field Layout (alpha stability): This module provides the ability for site builders to rearrange fields on content types, block types, etc. into new regions, for both the form and display, on the same forms provided by the normal field user interface. See the entity display layout roadmap for the next steps for this module.

Updated experimental features

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 (beta stability)

As of 8.3.0, the Migrate API now has beta stability, meaning that no future backwards-incompatible API changes are anticipated, so developers can leverage these APIs in custom migrations. Migrate will be considered completely stable after the issues tagged Migrate critical are resolved, to ensure the base API fully supports critical functionality.

Migrate Drupal and Migrate Drupal UI (alpha stability)

Core provides migrations for most Drupal 6 data and can be used for migrating Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 8. The Drupal 6 to 8 migration path will enter beta stability once a critical issue with user picture IDs is addressed. (Other outstanding issues for the Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 migration)
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. Most high-priority migrations are already available. (Outstanding issues for the Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 migration)
Drush support is currently only available in the Drupal Upgrade contributed module. (See the pull request to add support to Drush .)

Content Moderation (alpha stability)

Content Moderation allows content workflow states such as Draft, Archived, and Published, and now depends on the new experimental Workflows module (described above) to supply workflows and transitions for these states. See the Workflows change record for more information.

Important: If you previously installed Content Moderation in 8.2.x, you must uninstall it before upgrading to 8.3.0-alpha1 or you will encounter fatal errors. You will need to reconfigure your workflows and transitions with the new module after upgrading and re-enabling Content Moderation, so be sure to back them up beforehand. (No upgrade path is supplied since the module is still alpha stability.)

Content Moderation includes many additional improvements in this release:

#2787881: Non-translatable entity types can now be moderated.
#2799785: Entity types without bundles can be moderated, as long as they have revisions.
#2809123: When reverting a moderated revision, the moderation state is now reverted too.
The module now publishes any entity type that implements EntityPublishedInterface, not just Nodes.

See the Content Moderation roadmap for the next steps for this module.

Settings Tray (alpha stability)

This is a prototype of Dries's proposed Outside-In usability enhancements. It allows configuring page elements such as blocks and menus from the frontend of your site. See the roadmap of outstanding issues, which includes both planned improvements and known accessibility and interaction bugs. The module is more polished in this release, but still considered alpha stability. It needs to become stable within the next six months to remain in core.

DateTime Range (alpha stability)

The DateTime Range module provides a field type that allows end dates. This is important for contributed modules like the Calendar module to work with Drupal 8 core. Contrib and site authors can begin working with the module so long as they are willing to manage the risks of using an alpha experimental module. You can read the DateTime Range module plan for the next steps to make this useful field a part of the Standard installation. This module needs to become stable within the next six months to remain in core.

Place Block (alpha stability)

This 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. The Place Block module needs to reach stability within the next six months to remain in core.

Inline Form Errors (alpha stability)

This provides a proof-of-concept for showing form errors inline for improved accessibility. Since the last minor release, important progress has been made on this module's has outstanding issues. Help resolve the remaining issues on the roadmap to keep this module in Drupal core for 8.3.0.

Third-party library updates

In addition to the vendor updates and coding standards changes descibed below, PHP CodeSniffer and Drupal Coder have been added as development requirements: #2744463: Add phpcs/coder to dev requirements.

#2828494: Update CKEditor library to 4.6
#2804365: Update Twig to 1.25
#2763787: Upgrade random_compat to latest version
Pipe char in locators break Mink and Symfony element search (We updated several vendor libraries to versions that included our upstream fix for this bug.)

Changed coding standards

The following standards have been adopted for 8.3.x. Drupal core does not yet fully comply with these standards, but will be updated during the release candidate phase.

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 8.3.0-alpha1 (in addition to the dozens of other fixes listed at the end of this post):

Known issues

There are no known regressions in this release.

A recently discovered data loss issue affects this release:

Bulk operation actions might not act on the selected items

Drupal 8 currently has a number of known issues related to incorrect tracking of file usage, which can result in files being unexpectedly deleted from a site. Site owners experiencing unexplained file loss should consider setting "Delete orphaned files" to "Never" on /admin/config/media/file-system until these issues are resolved, and note the following issues:

The following issues may affect people running this release on specific hosting environments: