Drupal 6.0 released

Bringing greater simplicity, performance and style to this open source social publishing platform

February 13, 2008 -- The Drupal project today announced the official release of Drupal 6, the latest version of its award-winning open source content management platform. This new release is packed with hundreds of improvements, including workflow and usability enhancements, integrated AJAX and multilingual support, adoption of the OpenID authentication standard, increased power and flexibility in creating custom visual themes and streamlined administration tools. Drupal 6 is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License and is available for download at http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0.

"The core idea behind Drupal is go give everyone the power to create compelling community-driven web sites without sacrificing power," said Dries Buytaert, Drupal project lead and chief technology officer of Acquia, Inc. "Drupal 6 is true to this heritage, offering the best-ever performance, functional power, and polish. I can't wait to see what the global Drupal community does with it."

Drupal 6 offers new capabilities and enhancements in the areas that web developers and site owners value most including:

• Simplified Installation. Essential site settings are automatically configured when installing a new Drupal site, including the creation of administrator accounts. Developers creating pre-configured "turnkey" distributions of Drupal can customize the installer with additional configuration steps.
• Multilingual Publishing. Drupal now supports true multilingual web sites, managing content in multiple languages and providing automatic detection of a user's preferred language. Out of the box, Drupal supports both left-to-right and right-to-left languages.
• Rich User Interface. Using AJAX techniques, Drupal 6 offers simpler and more responsive administration tools. With drag-and-drop organizing of content, tools for managing complex information hierarchies, and subtle usability enhancements like table headers that stay with you instead of scrolling off the page, Drupal 6 simplifies site management. Developers can use the same framework to add dynamic effects that gracefully degrade in older browsers.
• Zero-Programming Theme Creation. Building a new, custom look for a Drupal 6 web site requires no PHP code. Instead, drop in your CSS files and images, tell Drupal where to find them, and you're ready to go. More complex custom themes can now take advantage of easy-to-edit template files that override Drupal's default HTML markup.
• Update Notification. Drupal can notify site administrators of software upgrades and bug fixes automatically. Concerned about security? Have your site notify you via email when security fixes are released for its add-on modules.
• Dramatic Performance Improvements. All these new features come with an added bonus - higher performance. In addition to high-performance caching for anonymous users, Drupal 6 offers a host of under-the-hood optimizations that speed up sites with large numbers of logged-in users. For server administrators with high-traffic sites, the new version simplifies integration with third-party caching solutions and load balancers.

In addition to the major new functional capabilities and performance improvements, hundreds of smaller improvements have enhanced the overall fit and finish of this release while offering an even more reliable foundation for developers building their own Drupal extensions. A detailed list of enhancements is available at http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0.

Drupal 6 development has been a collaboration among hundreds of individual open source developers from around the world. Over 700 individuals have contributed code and bug fixes during this development cycle, and more than 100 third-party plugin modules are already available for Drupal 6. Hundreds more will be released as developers upgrade existing modules to take advantage of Drupal 6's new capabilities.

Dries Buytaert founded the Drupal project in 2001 as testbed for emerging social technologies on the web while a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Since then, Drupal has evolved into a flexible, feature-rich platform for building content-driven community web sites. The project is a true open source success story in which thousands of volunteer developers, businesses and nonprofit organizations cooperate to build and support the core platform and thousands of plug-in modules have been developed to add features ranging from e-commerce solutions to advanced media management and social networking tools. Today, Drupal powers hundreds of thousands of web sites for companies large and small including Warner Brothers Records, Fast Company magazine, The New York Observer, The Onion, Amnesty International, SonyBMG, Forbes, Harvard University, and more.

Quotes About Drupal 6

"Drupal 6 has provided us with the perfect platform to re-launch our community site. With Drupal, we're able to offer a much richer user experience. We're quite happy with the performance improvements, and are also looking forward to offering content in multiple languages. These new directions just wouldn't have been possible without using Drupal."

Trevor Twining, co-owner, CashkeepersCanada.com