Drupal has long prided itself for staying ahead of the curve technologically. In order to be able to write the best quality Drupal software, Drupal developers need the best programming tools available. Today, the best PHP available is PHP 5.

PHP 5 has been deployed and tested in production environments for three years. Unfortunately, web hosts have been slow to adopt PHP 5, which has made it difficult for Drupal and many other PHP projects to fully embrace PHP 5's features.

Now a growing consortium of PHP projects have joined together and push for wider PHP 5 adoption. By all embracing PHP 5 together, the projects involved in the GoPHP 5 effort are sending a message to web hosts that it is time to embrace PHP's future.

Drupal is now part of that movement.

Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements!

• improved logging functionality
• support for reverse proxies
• many language system improvements (support for right to left languages, advanced language detection, support for translating posts to different languages, etc)
• improved handling of teasers
• drastic theme system improvements
• an improved installer
• support for OpenID
• and much more

There are also a ton of API improvements that should lead to more and better contributed modules. For a complete overview of the most notable improvements, take a look at the CHANGELOG.txt.

Drupal 6 will be an important factor for Drupal's continued success in 2007 and 2008. Needless to say, I'm really happy with what we accomplished together. Especially with the improved localization (l10n) support and the newly added internationalization (i18n) support, we hope to reach out to a much larger group of people.

In preparation of the Drupal 6.0 release development of Drupal core is frozen as of July 1st. During the initial stage of the code freeze, documentation updates, usability improvements, and performance improvements will still be accepted. New functionality or API changes / additions, on the other hand, will not be unless deemed critical. As of today, the focus is to strengthen the code base's performance, usability, and stability. As we progress, focus will shift towards stability and, near the end of the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed, until no release critical bugs are left. As always, everyone is invited to help.

After much hard work led by James Walker, OpenID 2.0 support is now in Drupal 6 core!

OpenID is a decentralized, secure single sign-on system. It allows you to create a login at a site you frequent, and use that same login on any other site that supports OpenID. Drupal 5.x and below have supported this with the built-in Drupal module, but OpenID is an open standard, better supported, and more secure.

Drupal has received one of the “Webware 100” awards for the Publishing category by CNET Webware. Other winners in this category include:

• Wordpress
• Google Analytics
• FeedBurner
• Blogger and
• Adobe Flash

A quote from the official announcement:

Publishing had no mass consumer brands in the top 10, as most of the other categories did. WordPress got the most votes. I was interested to see the Drupal CMS platform placing high in this category--above the consumer-oriented publishing products Typepad and Vox. Even combined, these two Six Apart services didn't come close to winning the same number of votes as Drupal.

A complete list of all the competitors can be found on the webware.com site.

The finalists for the “Webware 100” awards were selected by the editors of Webware.com, a CNET site, but the ultimate winners were picked by the users. The “Webware 100” Awards recognizes the best Web 2.0 sites, services, and applications that are leading the next wave of innovation.

Welcome to the June 2007 issue of the Drupal Newsletter! We've restructured how the newsletter is written, and moved everything to a much-more-public wiki at Drupal Groups, we hope you'll come over and contribute to the next issues :o). Elsewhere, the Drupal code freeze for version 6 has been delayed by 4 weeks, now at July 1st; developers everywhere have just started complaining about not having enough time, now they have to finish those patches!

Enough talk, the next issue of the Drupal Newsletter starts.......right now.