News and announcements

Update: Drupal 7.0 Beta 1 is available now!

Our last Drupal 7 alpha version was released about two months ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the seventh (and hopefully final) alpha version of Drupal 7.x for your further testing and feedback. The first alpha announcement provided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 6.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 7 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

This release includes:

• HUGE number of upgrade path fixes, including automated tests for updates. We are *very* close to a totally working upgrade path! Please test!
• Great usability improvements, including the installer not greeting you with a red error of death anymore on shared hosts!
• Field UI improvements to allow it to be further extended from contrib.
• Numerous Form API fixes and improvements.
• Numerous accessibility fixes.
• A variety of PostgreSQL and SQLite fixes, almost at 100% automated tests passing on both!
• Lots of polish on coding standards compliance and API documentation.
• Markup improvements, and a new default jQuery UI theme.
• Numerous security fixes, including 'forward-ports' of Drupal core SAs, and fixes to private files.
• Performance improvements.
• There have been several API changes since alpha6 to fix critical issues. These are broadcast to the development mailing list by Randy Fay.

When will alpha become beta?

We have identified several "beta blocking" issues, and itemized these at the Drupal core community initiatives page. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. We can potentially reach beta within the next month by focusing on this short-list of issues! Please help!

The Drupal.org redesign team has made significant progress in the two sprints since our last update. Since beginning work with the contractor team, we have completed over 50 issues related to the Drupal redesign. We’ve also created a volume of documentation and posts related to our community initiatives and the redesign implementers group. We also presented a panel session, held BOF and sprinted at Drupalcon Copenhagen.

If you’re interested in looking at the work that we’ve done, it is all visible in the issue queue tagged with “drupal.org redesign”. You can also view our progress on http://redesign.drupal.org [user:drupal, pass:drupal]. Finally, you can also check out a video showcasing some of our progress.