Yesterday, the Drupal core team made Drupal 8 Release Candidate 1 available. We won’t have to wait much longer for the final release of the best Drupal ever!

Holly Ross from the Drupal Association highlights the improvements in the upcoming release:

“With Drupal 8, the world’s best content management framework just got better. Every built-in theme is responsive. Every single component is translatable out of the box. More elements have configurable fields and there are new field types for better content modeling.

It’s built people-first. The authoring experience is better, with features like in-context editing and enhanced previews. It’s easier to add people-friendly meaning via native schema.org markup. There’s extensive support for accessibility standards.

Drupal 8 also has all the geekery you can Git. All-new configuration management (full exports, easier transitions between environments) means safer, faster site development and maintenance. REST-first native web services enable 3rd-party integrations. And adding Twig is the most complete transformation of Drupal theming in a decade. It allows friendlier syntax, better security, and a separate presentation layer.”

Drupal founder Dries Buytaert is excited as well:

“Historically, the adoption of Drupal has roughly doubled with each new release. We expect no different from Drupal 8, a release I believe positions Drupal most strongly for the future. We’ve undergone some big architectural changes to get more people using Drupal, and to prepare ourselves for the future. I can’t wait to see what the community does with Drupal 8. It’s time to start building!”

Yes, it’s time! Our engineering team has been busy over the last weeks, and we’re happy to say that freistilbox is ready for Drupal 8!

To prepare freistilbox for the requirements of Drupal 8, we’ve made a bunch of changes to modernise our web server setup. All our new freistilbox clusters make use of new software versions to make your website fly.

First of all, your application will enjoy the improvements in functionality, performance and stability that come with PHP 5.5.29. For example, we’ve replaced the APC opcode cache extension with the more efficient Opcache built into the PHP interpreter.

With the switch to PHP 5.5, we’ve also upgraded Apache from version 2.2 to 2.4. Its lower memory footprint leaves more memory to your web application. The Apache team also did a tremendous job at performance tuning. While Apache had a reputation for not being as fast as other web servers such as nginx, the new Apache version definitely measures up with its competition. Many of the new features and options in Apache 2.4 open up opportunities that we’ll use to make freistilbox even better over the coming months.

Due to changes in its configuration syntax, Apache 2.4 may make it necessary to modify your .htaccess files. See the freistilbox documentation for details.

For a quick and easy application setup, you can avail of Drupal 8 versions of our pre-fab configuration snippets. Simply use “d8” in your require_once statements.

Of course, our new and improved Drupal 8 setup is available not only to new customers. So if you’d like your existing cluster upgraded for Drupal 8, just send us a support request!

Until the final Drupal 8.0.0 is released, there might still be slight changes necessary. Rest assured that we’ll be quick to adapt freistilbox so you can launch your shiny new Drupal 8 website on release day!