Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past three months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements, including an installer, requirement checking for modules, a reorganization of the administration pages and file structure, a light-weight CCK, inclusion of jQuery and much more. We're also working on a new core theme (no guarantees it'll make it in time). With all that, I feel that, finally, the stars have aligned, and we're ready to call the next Drupal version, "Drupal 5.x". Thanks to all our contributors, Drupal 5.x promises to be an amazing release!

In preparation of the Drupal 5.x release, and as promised many moons ago, development of Drupal core is frozen as of today, September 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. Thus, 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.

We can't say when Drupal 5.x will be ready (it's ready when it's ready) but it is estimated that it will take at least two months before Drupal 5.x can be released. During that period, one or more release candidates will be made available. Furthermore, a two month code freeze should give module maintainers plenty of time to upgrade their modules. People who maintain contributed modules or themes are advised to start updating them to be compatible with Drupal 5.x.

I'm sure that in the next couple months we'll be talking more about the new features in Drupal 5.x. In the meantime, the curious can check the updated CHANGELOG.txt.

IBM's Internet Technology Group has written a very nice series of articles on Drupal, the latest of which gives a fabulous introduction to the basics of Drupal.

This article gives you an overview of the Drupal content management system. We'll describe the common building blocks and discuss some common assumptions of the Drupal approach. It is helpful to understand core concepts and basic Drupal terminology as you go through this article and beyond.

The article starts off by explaining much of the Drupal jargon, and does so without falling back on other jargon, which is the first step for anyone wanting to understand the basic structures behind how Drupal works.

As seen on the Groups.Drupal Denver group...

Howdy,

It's time again for a Denver Drupal User Group meeting. In addition to the usual "talk about whatever you want" format, Betsy has some specific community portal questions that she's going to bring up for discussion.

Subject: Drupal, Q&A, Community Portal Stuff, Chatting

Location: Paris On the Platte (gmap)

Audience:Anyone who is interested in Drupal or has used it before. The Q&A and chats are what you make of them. Likely topics include BarCamp, "AJAX" and CCK and Views and your favorite changes that made it in before the code freeze (that is, September 1).

Time: 7:00 PM for the regular meeting, I'll be there starting at about 6:00 or so to hold down a table, chat, hack, etc.

If this time/place doesn't work for you, please vote in the poll and leave a comment so we can figure out where to hold the next meeting. Also, recommendations for venues will be highly appreciated. Paris On The Platte seemed to work pretty well last times.

The Open Source Labs (OSL), one of Drupal's key contributors, is organizing a OSL Rackathon. In return for donations, OSL is putting the names of donors up on their racks. They'll be posting pictures of those racks on a regular basis. The money from the Rackathon goes to cover the cost of hosting.

Not much dramatic has happened in the last few months. Mostly it's been editing and incremental adding, editing and updating pages with a few bonuses. To highlight some items seems a good idea. Please chime in as I'm sure I've missed some.

We've had the addition of various Video casts that people seem to enjoy. I would like to see more. I keep pretending that I'll have time to make some myself but so far that hasn't happened. Heine pointed out wink as a possible tool to generate some if anyone else was wanting to hop in and contribute. (You are of course welcome to use other tools, I just thought I'd mention it as free).

People have always been able to add pages to the handbook, they just went into moderation for a few days. Despite that, for our community our size, we still have a relatively small documenation contributor base but it is growing. Something that is very nice to see. A few weeks ago I chaged the default behavior of book pages and took all book submissions out of moderation. This has resulted in a bit more spam, test and garbage pages being visible in the handbook but so far has been under control. The other result is that you are able to edit your former contributions without knocking the page back into moderation.

We've just posted the 21st episode of the Drupal Podcast! It is an interview with JQuery author, John Resig. We talk about what JQuery is, how it works, and how it will fit into Drupal.

Past episodes of the podcast include an interview with Leo Laporte about his Drupal site, TWiT.tv; an interview with Drupal founder, Dries Buytaert; ecommerce maintainer, Gordon Heydon; Karoly "CHX" Negyesi; and lots of Drupal news, tips, and information.