Earlier this week Steve Burge posted the intriguingly titled There Will Never be a Drupal 9. While that sure makes you click on the article, it is not quite true.

Drupal 8.0.0 made several big changes but among the biggest is the adoption of semantic versioning with scheduled releases.

Scheduled releases were decided to happen around twice a year. And indeed, Drupal 8.1.0 was released on time, Drupal 8.2.0 is in beta and Drupal 8.3.x is already open for development and got some changes committed that Drupal 8.2.x will never have. So this works pretty well so far.

As for semantic versioning, that is not a Drupalism either, see http://semver.org/. It basically means that we have three levels of version numbers now with clearly defined roles. We increment the last number when we make backwards compatible bug fixes. We increment the middle number when we add new functionality in a backwards compatible way. We did that with 8.1.0 and are about to do it with 8.2.0 later this year. And we would increment the first number (go from 8.x.x to 9.0.0) when we make backwards incompatible changes.

So long as you are on some version of Drupal 8, things need to be backwards compatible, so we can just add new things. This still allows us to modernize APIs by extending an old one in a backwards compatible way or introducing a new modern API alongside an old one and deprecate (but not remove!) the old one. This means that after a while there may be multiple parallel APIs to send emails, create routes, migrate content, expose web services and so on, and it will be an increasingly bigger mess.

There must be a balance between increasing that mess in the interest of backwards compatibility and cleaning it up to make developer's lives easier, software faster, tests easier to write and faster to run and so on. Given that the new APIs deprecate the old ones, developers are informed about upcoming changes ahead of time, and should have plenty of time to adapt their modules, themes, distributions. There may even be changes that are not possible in Drupal 8 with parallel APIs, but we don't yet have an example of that.

After that Drupal 9 could just be about removing the bad old ways and keeping the good new ways of doing things and the first Drupal 9 release could be the same as the last Drupal 8 release with the cruft removed. What would make you move to Drupal 9 then? Well, new Drupal 8 improvements would stop happening and Drupal 9.1 will have new features again.

While this is not a policy set in stone, Dries Buytaert had this to say about the topic right after his DrupalCon Barcelona keynote in the Q&A almost a year ago:

Read more about and discuss when Drupal 9 may be open at https://www.drupal.org/node/2608062

Drupal 8 makes huge-huge strides in terms of reaching more people on the globe by making everything translatable and automating translation downloads and updates from the community among hundreds of other improvements. What about software translation contribution though? We did not make progress on that front in core, but it is not very hard to do as a contributed module.

The Localization client module is available for Drupal 7 and 6. It does two things: it provides an alternate nicer user interface to translate Drupal (modules) and it allows you to contribute to the community right from that interface. Drupal 8 already improved the built-in translation interface considerably, so it made sense to start with porting the contribution functionality and integrate that first. The initial Drupal 8 port of that is available for your testing now!

To try it out:

• Join the https://localize.drupal.org/ team you want to contribute translations to (if not already). For testing, you can use the test language. Or better: just test with good translation suggestions so your reviewers will be happy.
• Grab the Drupal 8.x-1.0-alpha1 version of Localization client. Install the Localization Client Contributor submodule only (you would not be able to install the other one yet anyway).
• The module comes with contribution enabled by default, but you need to set your API key so localize.drupal.org can identify you. Edit your user account on your site and enter the API key there. (Follow the instructions on the API key field on your user account edit screen).
• If you want to grant other people to contribute, grant them the Contribute translations to localization server permission to contribute and tell them to enter their respective API keys on their user profiles.
• Now when you go to the built-in software translation UI it will tell you that all things changed will also be submitted to localize.drupal.org and the submit button will reflect that too, to make it super-clear. If you did not set your API key yet, it will tell you to do that instead.
• Once submitting the translation changes, it will let you know how many strings were successfully submitted and any errors encountered as well. All messages are also logged for later review.

The resulting effect of submitting changes locally are visible remotely by the community as well, yay!

Happy translating! See known issues and report more at https://www.drupal.org/project/issues/l10n_client?version=8.x Further improvements are of course possible, issues are welcome!

In the previous tidbits we covered each language and translation capability one by one. The community translates the software interface on http://localize.drupal.org/ which you can customize with Interface translation. You can translate your local configuration and content with the Configuration translation and Content translation modules respectively. However, actual real life use cases are never clear cut like that. Content shows up with some shipped interface elements, local configuration and content. Menus contain elements from code, content and configuration. It is good to know how these pieces relate so you can translate every piece and know the right place to do it.

Up to date as of March 14th, 2017.

Now that we covered how content translation workflow works in Drupal 8, its time to look a bit at the API side. In Drupal 7 this meant dealing with scary seemingly infinitely nested arrays with language codes, field names, deltas, etc. Drupal 8 makes this a whole lot simpler.

Up to date as of November 10th, 2015.

In the previous tidbit, we covered content translation basics. In short now you can configure translatability on any subtype of any entity type, so for example articles or specific taxonomy vocabularies may be configured to have all their entities support translation. Then each entity structure may be configured on the field and in some cases subfield level to support translation. The question is how does it all work then, what do we do to translate content?