Drupal 8 has been released into the wild. I wish to give both a high level overview of what Drupal 8 brings to the table as well as discuss some of the exciting lower-level improvements. Attendees can expect to leave with a broader understanding of Drupal 8 and know where to go to find out more information.

Proposed Outline:

• Drupal in a nutshell 
• Goodness - there is a lot of new stuff in the Drupal we know
  • API friendly & RESTFUL integrations
  • CKeditor and Views now shipping out of the box and what that means for instant productivity
  • Enhanced accessibility to further the web for everyone
  • Proper deployment mechanisms with configuration management
• The new Drupal - don't be afraid
  • A new theme layer built upon Twig
  • Composer for keeping dependencies under control
  • Symfony
  • BigPipe - ready to rock and roll
• Contrib
  • A brief overview of what is ready for Drupal 8
• Moving forward with Drupal 8

I realize that is a lot to cover in 45 minutes. The idea is to give an on the ground perspective on where Drupal 8 is at and how folks can start to use it for their projects now. I hope to showcase a few examples of the work being done by the community.

As much as I can I hope to share experiences of the Bellingham Drupal community working with Drupal 8 in our monthly meetups and I have a few real world use cases where WWU has done a lot of work with Drupal 7 that will be greatly simplified by migrating to Drupal 8.