Drupal 6.17: The Drupal Super Fixer-Upper

As much as I talk about Drupal here at CMS Report, I often don't talk about Drupal point releases that provide solely security and bug fixes and no new features. Every once in awhile though there is a new version of Drupal 6 that has been especially polished by Drupal's developers. Drupal 6.17 is one of those releases which contain significant changes I think are worthy a mention.

I'm probably most excited about the improvements made in Drupal 6 for better PHP 5.3 compatibility. A couple weeks ago I tried upgrading my server to PHP 5.3 and there were just too many annoying errors showing up in the Drupal 6 system logs.  I'm hoping with Drupal 6.17, I have better luck this time around (currently running this Drupal 6 sites with PHP 5.3).

With over 55 patches committed to improve Drupal 6, the following are the highlights of changes included in Drupal 6.17:

• Improvements of session cookie handling
• Better processing of big XML-RPC payload
• Improved PostgreSQL compatibility
• Better PHP 5.3 and PHP 4 compatibility (my fingers are crossed)
• Improved Japanese support in search module
• Better browser compatibility of CSS and JS aggregation
• Improved logging for login failures
• An incompatibility of Drupal 6.16's new lock subsystem with some contributed modules was also resolved

The latest version of Drupal may be downloaded from the project page at Drupal.org. Whether you're new to Drupal or currently maintaining a Drupal site, this latest release of Drupal is a clear indication that there is plenty of life and plenty of development taking place with the Drupal 6 release. Now what other Drupal 6 sites do I have that still need this upgrade to Drupal 6.17.