The long-awaited eighth edition of open source web platform Drupal has been released.
Drupal 8.0.0 is now available for download from drupal.org.
The release includes significant improvements for content creators and site administrators including out of the box support for WYSIWYG content creation, responsive design, and multi-language sites.
Under the hood there were even more significant changes, with Drupal 8 involving a major re-architecture of the content-management system.
Drupal core co-maintainer Angela Byron previously described the changes to the project's internals in D8 as "getting off the island".
D8 rolled in a number of components from the Symfony2 PHP framework and there was a focus on updating the code base to employ modern design patterns.
Drupal is allowed to break backwards compatibility between major releases.
A decision was made to go "whole hog and catch up with everybody else and get the code base to the point where it's all object-oriented, and decoupled, and unit tested and all of these kinds of things, so that going forward ... we never have to do this big re-architecture again," Byron told Computerworld Australia in an interview earlier this year.
"This particular reboot has taken one-third of Drupal's lifespan to complete," Drupal's creator and CTO of Acquia Dries Buytaert wrote in a blog entry.
"We've implemented a more modern development framework, reimagined the usability and authoring experience, and made technical improvements that will help us build for the multilingual, mobile and highly personalized experiences of the future," Buytaert wrote.
In Australia, Drupal has become the CMS of choice for many government agencies.
Earlier this year the government's Drupal-based govCMS platform went live. The cloud platform is delivered by Acquia under a contract with the federal government.