It has been a while since the last Drupal 4.5.0 status report so the following is a summary of the key aspects we have been working on since the last status report, posted approximately three months ago.

• Tabs. Drupal pages now use tabs for local tasks as can be seen on this example screenshot.
• Node level permissions. It is now possible to control access to individual posts - either by user, by role or by category.
• Sticky forum posts. You'll be able to make forum posts sticky such that they are presented at the top of the forum topic listings.
• Multiple roles per user. Users can be assigned multiple roles which is very convenient.
• Blogging improvements. We added a 'recent comments' and 'categories' block that are typically available on weblogs, and included support for auto-discovery via RSD.
• Form handling. Form handling has been reworked to ensure consistency across modules and to improve error handling and accessibility.
• Administration pages. We reorganized a significant portion of the administration pages, which makes it more intuitive to administer your Drupal site.
• Gzip compression. To reduce bandwidth, Drupal can send gzip compressed pages.

I'd like to freeze the development version of Drupal on August 15 in preparation of the Drupal 4.5.0 release. When the code freeze is in effect, only bug fixes, documentation updates and small usability or performance improvements will be accepted. All in all, this means we have about 1.5 months left to get all kind of improvements into core. This probably marks a good time to start wrapping up your custom changes and to make them available for inclusion in core.