[Editor's note: In the 8 years since this was written, all but a few of the links have rotted. To preserve the original sense of what is/isn't meant to be linked, these dead links have been changed to "example.com" rather than completely removed.]

I am in the process of designing a new approach to the themeing system currently employed by Drupal. But first I feel I might need to explain a bit about the approach I am leaning towards. If you are interested in Drupal themeing, I would greatly appreciate if you read the entire post, as I would like as much input about what I am planning, as to better try to help Drupal designers. This is a rather in depth post, but contains some insights into the new system I am currently developing.

I feel that most of what we consider a 'Drupal theme' at this stage, is too complex, and too rigid a framework for most web designers attempting to work with our platform. I propose we rethink the theme system as it currently stands to be a more generic templating system. Specifically , most of cruft in themes can be attributed to completely separate configuration settings and capabilities for each. This leaves us with a set of themes which are incompatible and different from each other, and if a designer wants a feature only another theme supports .. he is left with the choice of porting the feature to his current theme (not that easy for non programmers), or rebuilding his work on the new theme. The designer might even be faced with judgment calls regarding which set of features he would rather have.

After an extensive testing period, the Drupal project has released version 4.4.0 of its open-source content management and community platform. The release of version 4.4.0 adds a number new features that improve Drupal's flexibility, performance, usability and accessibility. A list of the major changes and additions is provided below. For more information, please refer to the CHANGELOG.

You can download Drupal 4.4.0 from http://www.drupal.org/drupal/drupal-4.4.0.tgz.

With Drupal 4.4.0 around the corner, it is time to share what each of us are up to. If you plan to work on something in particular, or to contribute to Drupal in one way or another, please share your personal battle plan in the comments. Please refrain from posting wishlists: this time around we are merely interested in what you actually plan to contribute in the next few months. So, what can we expect from you?

Earlier this week I committed a new profile module to the development branch. I just finished upgrading drupal.org to take advantage of these new improvements. If you check your account settings (authentication required), you'll notice that I added quite a few fields that let you define your role within the Drupal community or the Drupal project.

Furthermore, updated profiles can be browsed (or filtered) using some of these new fields. For example, click here for a list of Belgian Drupal users, here for a list of female Drupal users or here for a list of documentation contributors.

(Update, March 21: I've made some more changes based on the feedback posted in the comments. The updates are outlined below. You might want to revisit your account settings.)

A few hours ago, I uploaded a package of Drupal version 4.3.2 to Debian unstable. This upload will hopefully fix all the critical bugs of the previous package (and introduce no new ones). Another highlight is that the package supports PostgreSQL (although this may still need some polishing).

Please submit any bugs you find in my package through the Debian bug tracking system, since that's the quickest and most reliable way of reaching my attention.

With Drupal 4.4.0 on the horizon, this marks a good time for a new round of website suggestions. In short, is there any way in which our website, http://drupal.org/, could serve you better? Let's try to compile a comprehensive list of both shortcommings and suggestions that we can translate into concrete tasks.