We are pleased to announce that the first Drupal 4.4.0 release candidate is available. A list of the major changes can be found in the CHANGELOG file. Right now most things are wrapped up, so we'd like you to help polish this release and help iron out final issues: your comments on the stability, correctness and performance of this release candidate are more than welcome!

You can download the latest release candidate at http://www.drupal.org/drupal/drupal-4.4.0-rc.tgz.

I'm thrilled to announce the release of a collection of modules used to drive a full-fledged ecommerce system from within Drupal. The design for this project was to create an extensible framework such that the payment methods, shipping methods, and design are built upon a pluggable architectures. Even the types of products you can create is pluggable. Currently, shippable items, services, and product packages are supported. I plan to have support for file downloads within a month.

After some playing around with static pages, books, and a variety of other organization techniques for my magazine content, I've decided that there are just some key features I want to implement that I don't see in existing modules. Thus, I'm undertaking the creation of a "magazine" module. Here are core features that I'm building in ...

It's been a while since the last major Drupal release (nearly 4 months in fact), so it's time for something fresh. Behind the scenes, Drupal developers have been busy working on the next release, Drupal 4.4.0. To prepare for this release, we have frozen the code for the 4.4 branch. In the initial stage of the code freeze, documentation updates, usability improvements and performance improvements will still be accepted. However, no new features or functionality will be added.

Update: an installer finally got into Drupal 5

Over the last few weeks, I have been attempting to simplify the deeper intricacies of installing, and maintaining a drupal system, while allowing for a more centralized/controlled method of providing database scripts for contributed modules.

A good example of the intended result would be quotes and menus in the contrib modules. The modules contain the neccesary SQL to create, and update the tables required for operaton/installation of the module directly within the .module code. This makes them incredibly userfriendly, and simple for even the greenest newbie to install a contributed module without needing to know anything about MySQL, PostgreSQL an ssh connection and yes , even phpmyadmin.

I wrote up a document that talks about Drupal Permissions Control. A lot of people have been requesting it, and I'm beginning some implementation, but I thought that I'd write out exactly what I thought (based on experience, on reading other forum posts, etc.) permissions was. It's been called "access control", "security model", and so forth, but I lumped it under "permissions" in this document.

What I need is someone to help me review it - to get some comments and some feedback to be sure that this is exactly what people want to see. If we do it well, then we won't have to go back and fix it when people complain. I know that we're not trying to IMPRESS anyone, nor do we have any kind of deadline, but I personally think it's nice to know what we're doing before we go do it. So please take a look here and leave a comment as to what you think.