It's been a long cycle, but Drupal 5 is finally here. See the official announcement. Thanks everyone for your bug reports, patches, documentation and testing. We couldn't do it without you.

After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.

Drupal powers sites across the web, ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, MTV and even sites for NASA.

There have been over 492 contributors to the Drupal 5.0 release submitting 1173 patches, which is 150 more people than our previous record with Drupal 4.7. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, a new Drupal core theme, a web-based installer, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.

Download

http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-5.0.tar.gz

After a few final attempts to get new volunteers or other forms of help, I decided it is time to put the Drupal Theme Garden to rest; I simply don't have the time and the interest to be its responsible maintainer. And after these attempts (a few mails and requests on the infrastructure and theme developer mailing lists), it seems no one else has that time to spend or is interested in taking over. I posted a longer and in-depth story on my blog about the reasoning behind this action. In short, I have decided to discontinue the Drupal Theme Garden with the release of Drupal 5.0.

Just to be clear: this is not a call for volunteers. However, if you are seriously interested in taking over its maintenance, you must convince the infrastructure people, not me, to make you the new maintainer. In order to do that, you must be really serious and have serious time to spend on it: it makes little sense if someone takes over only to find that he or she loses interest after a month and to find ourselves back where we are right now.

We're pleased to announce the availability of the second Drupal 5 release candidate. We fixed most (if not all) pressing issues so we'd like you to help us test the stability, correctness and performance of this release so we can iron out the remaining issues. After 7-8 months of hard work, we're almost there, folks! And it is going to be a release which we can be really proud of.

Download it from: http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-5.0-rc2.tar.gz.

Read on to find out more details ...

We just upgraded drupal.org from Drupal 4.7 to the Drupal 5 release candidate. The upgrade went like we expected -- smooth. Kudos to all the people who helped make this possible!

So in good Drupal tradition, we get to "eat our own dog food" before a major release. Drupal.org served more than 9 million pages last month (36 million hits) so this upgrade should give Drupal 5 a good last workout and allows us to evaluate the readiness, snappiness, sweetness and overall happiness of the final Drupal 5 release.

November 2006 : Drupal.org has 100,000 nodes.

December 2006: Drupal.org has 100,000 users.

January 2007: Drupal.org has 50,000 commits for core and contrib.

Congratulations to Morbus Iff, your present is on its way ...

(No, I am not obsessed with meaningless numbers. I can stop any time. That is what my therapist told me!)