On Drupal's sixth birthday Dries Buytaert announced that Drupal 5.0 has been released. The 5.0 version of the content management system is considered a very significant release by its open source community. Consider this, it's been almost half a decade since Drupal 4.0 was released.
After 8 months of development we are ready to release Drupal 5.0 to the world. Today is also Drupal's 6th birthday, so the timing could not be more perfect. Drupal 4.0 was released in 2002 and finally we feel confident to increase the major version number from 4 to 5.
Drupal powers sites across the web, ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, MTV and even sites for NASA.
There are new features in Drupal 5.0 that current and new users will like in this new version of Drupal. A few of the new features in Drupal 5.0 being highlighted include:
- Major usability improvements
- A new Drupal core theme (Garland)
- A web-based installer
- Expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.
- Improvements in the administration interface
Incidentally, CMS Report runs on Drupal. We're currently running on Drupal 4.7, but you can bet we'll be installing Drupal 5 for this site very soon. We're already upgraded a few of our sites from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 5 and witnessed few problems after the upgrade. Drupal 5 looks to be very promising...