We're happy to announce the release of Blacklight 8.0.0, fortuitously timed
with Code4Lib 2023! This is the result of sprawling community contributions
across Blacklight's issues, comments, accessibility reviews, code
contributions, and project wrangling - thank you to everyone who has
pitched in on our first major release in 4 years.

Major updates and enhancements include:
- Bootstrap 5 support
- jQuery-optional deployment
- better-defined APIs for developing reusable customizations and
presentation changes
- modern Ruby, Rails, and JS/CSS bundling support

Full release notes are on github at:
https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight/releases/tag/v8.0.0

Special thanks to the Blacklight-supporting institutions that have been
upgrading their applications to the v8 release candidates to minimize
upgrade pain; please feel free to connect to the community about post-release
upgrades on https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/blacklight-development and
the #blacklight channel on the Code4Lib Slack (https://code4lib.slack.com/)
. Or file issues for bugs at https://github.com/projectblacklight/blacklight
/issues.

Ben Armintor (on behalf of the Blacklight committers)