News and announcements

Update: Drupal 7.0 Alpha 5 is available now!

Our third Drupal 7 alpha version was released just over a month ago. Today, we're proud to announce the release of the fourth 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 many critical bug fixes and other improvements, including:

• Color module now usable by themes other than Garland.
• Usability improvements including re-weightable roles and saner Forum module defaults.
• A variety of optimizations made to data import-related functions to make migrations faster.
• Lots of previously missing documentation for hooks has now been documented. Hooray!
• Increased test coverage, particularly core Tokens.
• Lots of smaller bug fixes, security patches, and improvements.

Please see the release notes for more details.

It is important to note that this alpha version should not be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but there are outstanding known issues (including security issues) and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet. Our next release will be on or about May 21, 2010. If the upgrade path is working, and all known security issues are fixed, this will be a beta. Otherwise, it will be another alpha release. It's expected we will have a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. You can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback.

Drupal is excited to announce that we have 18 amazing projects in this year's Google Summer of Code. This is the sixth year that Drupal has participated in the program, bringing the total investment made by Google in Drupal through the SoC to over $450,000. This investment has resulted in numerous modules and core improvements, but more importantly it has brought in many long time contributors to the drupal project and helped keep numerous other contributors engaged and active in the community.

This year's Summer of Code projects focus on integrating Drupal with other APIs, improving and updating popular contributed modules, improving security, and helping to build new functionalities that will help keep Drupal at the cutting edge. Some of the projects still require co-mentors, and we'll be trying to connect these students with the community in a real world setting, so if you're interested in helping out with community bonding or code review, or even if you just want to keep tabs on the SoC progress, join us over at the Summer of Code group - it's not too late for you to help out!

Please help us in thanking Google for their support of Drupal and all Free & Open Source Software projects, and please welcome our Summer of Code 2010 Students.