News and announcements

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.

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.