To clear things up, when you run sudo npm install -g ionic@beta you are installing the CLI (Command Line Interface) which lets you run the commands such as ionic start, ionic serve, etc. The Ionic CLI docs can be found here: http://ionicframework.com/docs/v2/cli/
So running ionic -v will give you the CLI version, not the framework version.
The framework version exists inside of the project, so you will not see a version number until you start a project. For example, here is my ionic info if I run this command inside of my project:
Cordova CLI: 6.1.1
Gulp version: CLI version 3.9.0
Gulp local: Local version 3.9.1
Ionic Framework Version: 2.0.0-beta.8
Ionic CLI Version: 2.0.0-beta.30
When you run ionic start it will generate a project using one of our starters. The following repositories hold the starters, and each one uses ionic2-app-base in order to determine the framework version:
So, when you start a new project using the CLI, it will create a project using whatever version is defined in the package.json of the ionic2-app-base repository:
We also have some documentation here to explain the different modules and npm:
There is nothing more you need to do in order to create a project using beta 8. We have already updated all of the starters with those steps. Please let me know if anything I said was confusing, thanks! 