News and announcements

With the current feature freeze of Drupal 5.0, it seems a good time to startup some marketing actions. A lot of people give presentations about Drupal in their country. A couple of these people work for a company that is delivering a service based on Drupal and hence will use a presentation template based on their corporate style. But a lot of us are presenting Drupal to a wider audience while not having a standard presentation or even a standard template (layout).

You are dedicated to Drupal and willing to help fixing bugs by coding, testing or documenting.

We are the creators of the best CMS in the world: Drupal.

Compensation

Eternal glory awaits the contributor who helps fixing core bugs: you will get into the Core CVS messages.

Workplace is #drupal-bugs on irc.freenode.net

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.