Drupal 8 is nearing the release candidate stage, with only a handful of critical issues remaining. This month, core developers committed to providing an upgrade path between all remaining releases, which means it's finally time to start building your first sites in Drupal 8!

Let's get together at this month's meetup to start our first Drupal 8 sites together. At the meetup, I'll lead everyone through the install process and then show off the new features of Drupal 8 for the site builder. I'm planning to focus on things you can do out of the box, without writing custom code or installing contrib modules. This is an area where Drupal 8 has really improved over Drupal 7.

We've talked about some of this stuff at previous meetups and DrupalCamps, but now it's time to get your hands dirty and try it for yourself. Everyone goes home with a shiny new Drupal 8 site to play with!

The meetup will be next Monday, September 28 at 7:00pm at Ann Arbor Spark Central (330 E Liberty St). Everyone planning to install Drupal 8 should come to the meetup with laptop, and ideally, with an available hosting account or local development environment to install Drupal on. If you don't have a local development environment, we'll help you set one up.

This is a meetup for all skill levels and interests, so I hope to see a lot of new faces next week as we welcome the future of Drupal.