The first release candidate for the upcoming Drupal 8.5.0 release is now available for testing. Drupal 8.5.0 is expected to be released March 7.

8.5.x makes the Media module available for all, improves migrations significantly, stabilizes the Content Moderation and Settings Tray modules, serves dynamic pages faster with BigPipe enabled by default, and introduces the new experimental Layout Builder module. The release includes several very important fixes for workflows of content translations and supports PHP 7.2. Finally, 8.5.0-rc1 also includes the same security updates that are provided in 8.4.5.

What does this mean to me?

For Drupal 8 site owners

Drupal 8.4.5, a security update and the final release of the 8.4.x series, has also been released this week. 8.4.x sites should update immediately to 8.4.5, but going forward, 8.4.x will receive no further releases following 8.5.0's release date, and sites should prepare to update from 8.4.x to 8.5.x in order to continue getting bug and security fixes. Use update.php to update your 8.4.x sites to the 8.5.x series, just as you would to update from (e.g.) 8.4.2 to 8.4.3. You can use this release candidate to test the update. (Always back up your data before updating sites, and do not test updates in production.)

If you're an early tester who is already running 8.5.0-alpha1 or 8.5.0-beta1, you should update to 8.5.0-rc1 immediately. 8.5.0-rc1 includes security fixes (the same fixes that were released in Drupal 8.4.5).

Site owners should also take note of the fact that Drupal 8's support for PHP 5 will end in one year, in March 2019. PHP 7.2 is now the best recommended PHP version to use with Drupal 8.

For module and theme authors

Drupal 8.5.x is backwards-compatible with 8.4.x. However, it does include internal API changes and API changes to experimental modules, so some minor updates may be required. Review the change records for 8.5.x, and test modules and themes with the release candidate now.

For translators

Some text changes were made since Drupal 8.4.0. Localize.drupal.org automatically offers these new and modified strings for translation. Strings are frozen with the release candidate, so translators can now update translations.

For core developers

All outstanding issues filed against 8.4.x were automatically migrated to 8.5.x. Future bug reports should be targeted against the 8.5.x branch. 8.6.x will remain open for new development during the 8.5.x release candidate phase. The 8.5.x branch will be subject to release candidate restrictions, with only critical fixes and certain other limited changes allowed.

Your bug reports help make Drupal better!

Release candidates are a chance to identify bugs for the upcoming release, so help us by searching the issue queue for any bugs you find, and filing a new issue if your bug has not been reported yet.

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Original author: Gábor Hojtsy