Drupalistas rejoice (again) -- we've reached another major milestone on the road to the official 5.0 stable release! The latest 5.0 release candidate code is now installed and running on http://scratch.drupal.org. This means that all of the modules and themes installed on drupal.org have been ported to the 5.x API.

Running the release candidate on a large site like drupal.org is an important way to flesh out any remaining bugs in the code, and the first step is running it on our test site. Please help us get 5.0 stable enough to release by checking out http://scratch.drupal.org and seeing if you find anything that doesn't work how you expect. We need your help testing, so read more to find out how...

Rejoice fellow Drupalites! After just two betas we present you the first Drupal 5 release candidate (RC1).

Download it from: http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-5.0-rc1.tar.gz.

You can read about the new features in the beta 1 announcement. In contrast to the beta's, most debugging has been done and, should no more fatal bugs emerge, this version is release worthy. A list of all the bugfixes since beta 2 can be found on the release page.

While we do not recommend to run release candidate 1 on production sites, we are going to break the rule ourselves on Drupal.org, in order to test Drupal 5 on a large site. We plan to upgrade Drupal.org to Drupal 5 RC1 somewhere during the next couple of weeks.

You may be glad to know that some of the most used contributed modules, such as CCK and Views have already been upgraded to work with Drupal 5. Others, such as Image and Image assist are actively being worked on. For a complete list, visit the Modules page and select 5.x from the dropdown menu. For all the other modules: keep your eye on the modules' issue queues or on the post Contrib modules version 5.x status to get an idea on the upgrade time-frame. If you are a module maintainer; Now is the time to start working on the update to Drupal 5.

We still need your help turning this release candidate into a true release! Read on to find out how....

Drupal's new default theme, Garland, is one of the many impressive parts of the upcoming 5.0 release, and the rest of the open source community has noticed! While Drupal 5 races towards completion, the folks at Wordpress.com have ported the new Garland theme and Steven Wittens' slick color switching tool for use with Wordpress.

Just launched our first Drupal site over at http://www.ConcreteIdeas.com.

After using Drupal once we are definitely converts and will likely make this our CMS of choice for all projects going forward. As this was our first foray into the world of Drupal we had a lot of help from a few key people (whom I'll mention in a follow-up post) that helped us ramp up the learning curve.

We've got a whole host of modules running on the site with a few custom (ahem, *hacks*) that make it all run nice and smooth...

The trickiest part was definitely the e-commerce component and that warrants an entire post (coming soon...) explaining all the twists and turns we followed before finally coming up with a very comprehensive (we think) solution. We used http://www.aMember.com plugged into the Cybersource gateway as we needed to support recurring credit card billing.

For those of you who may not follow Planet Drupal, Dries has posted a nice blog post that provides great graphics illustrating Drupal.org's growth in 2006. The upcoming release of 5.0 and consistent exposure on sites like Digg.com will surely help us continue the upward trend into 2007.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the second beta release of the most exciting Drupal yet: Drupal 5.0 beta 2! You can grab it while it's hot at:

http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-5.0-beta2.tar.gz

You can read about the new features present in Drupal 5.0 in the beta 1 announcement. Since beta 1 we have fixed a ton of bugs, having reviewed and committed over 160 patches, more than five every single day. So many thanks to you for the testing, the bug hunting, the patches and reviews. Please keep up the good work and help us turn this beta 2 release into a release candidate; we still need your help! Read on to find out how....