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 have been over 492 contributors to the Drupal 5.0 release submitting 1173 patches, which is 150 more people than our previous record with Drupal 4.7. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, a new Drupal core theme, a web-based installer, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.
Drupal is a very powerful and flexible content management system which I have running the 3puppies media and which Victoire is also trying out. I have pretty much worked out how to add quite a bit of functionality to the core installation and yet I still feel like I have just scratched the surface. If you are looking for a well developed and open source platform for your site and love digging around in all the menus and other bits and pieces then this could be the platform for you (unless, of course, you have people who love doing that stuff for you).
There are two videocasts available if you are upgrading to Drupal 5 from Drupal 4.7 and if you are installing it on to your server. These videocasts were made by Lullabot, the development company that developed, among others, the TWiT and MTV UK sites. There is also an overview of the new features in Drupal 5.
Tags: drupal, drupal 5, major release, content management system, open source
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