Code freeze in preparation of Drupal 6.0

Code freeze in preparation of Drupal 6.0

Dries - July 3, 2007

Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements!

improved logging functionality
support for reverse proxies
many language system improvements (support for right to left languages, advanced language detection, support for translating posts to different languages, etc)
improved handling of teasers
drastic theme system improvements
an improved installer
support for OpenID
and much more

There are also a ton of API improvements that should lead to more and better contributed modules. For a complete overview of the most notable improvements, take a look at the CHANGELOG.txt.

Drupal 6 will be an important factor for Drupal's continued success in 2007 and 2008. Needless to say, I'm really happy with what we accomplished together. Especially with the improved localization (l10n) support and the newly added internationalization (i18n) support, we hope to reach out to a much larger group of people.

In preparation of the Drupal 6.0 release development of Drupal core is frozen as of July 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. 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.

Because some patches were 98% ready before the code freeze, I also granted six exceptions. Six patches will have another two weeks to make it into Drupal 6 (or not). These patches are documented at patch spotlight page and are screaming for your help. Two weeks isn't a whole lot of time.

As usual, we can't say when Drupal 6.0 will be ready (it's ready when it's ready) but it is estimated that it will take at least two months before Drupal 6.0 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 contributed modules.