I started this topic to describe my experience with upgrading from Drupal 4.5.0 to Drupal 4.6.0 (released yesterday). I hope others can comment on what they found here, so that it becomes a single reference for others trying to do the same in the future.

The folks over at Good Basic have been doing a fine job of converting some of the brilliant templates available for various other CMS packages into Drupal templates. I have just committed, tagged for 4.6 release and created projects for the following new themes : Leaf, rdc*, Gespaa, Green Marinée and Blix.

UPDATE: I have uploaded screenshots of several of the contributed themes, including these five new ones, to the new Drupal.org theme gallery.

After six months of development, the Drupal team is proud to announce the Drupal 4.6.0 release! Thanks to those who contributed to this release, either by contributing code, testing the release candidate, providing support or writing documentation.

The key changes since Drupal 4.5 include:

• PHP5 support.
• Better search usability, improved results and relevancy.
• Personal contact forms for registered users.
• Improved multi-site support to run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base.
• Extensible RSS 2.0 syndication support for enclosures (e.g. podcasts) and categories.
• Ping Ping-O-Matic, to ping all major ping services.
• Usability improvements for permissions, block configuration, statistics tracking, logs, forum configuration, content administration, etc.

For a complete list, please consult the CHANGELOG. In addition to all of the above, we made significant improvements under the hood in terms of performance and better APIs. Contributed themes and modules have already begun to take advantage of these.

This year I have been nominated as the Sun RDP for Victoria to attend LCA 2005, Australia's national Linux conference. While I am there I am going to also be representing Drupal and get the word out there. I will have posters (thanks for the posters in the marketing dir) and will be giving a lightning talk on the up and coming release of Drupal 4.6.

I've been meaning to post about this for quite some time. We talked about the reverse bounty concept at DrupalCon. What this means is that a developer writes up a spec/requirements doc/idea for some Drupal development, and then also estimates how much time/money it would take to get it built. People then donate, and when the estimated money level is reached, the developer builds the code.

Unless showstopping bugs appear, Drupal 4.6 should be unleashed next week. That is, we are about to release Drupal 4.6 real soon now. This past month, the Drupal developers have been busy bees: they've poked at the Drupal 4.6 release candidate, turned it upside down, shaken (and occasionally stirred) it, dropped it, and still it held strong. As a result, we are increasingly confident that Drupal 4.6 is ready for production.