Drupal 6: More than a feeling

A few days ago, I mentioned that "Drupal 6 feels ready to me" for public release. Evidently, that was more than feeling as Drupal 6 was released early Wednesday morning.

As a user of Drupal, let me start by saying thank you to all the developers and advocates that brought Drupal 6 to light. I've been watching Drupal 6 grow from a distance this past year and have made some observations. There is a lot more sweat, tears, and love put into Drupal than most outsiders realize. Those of us that have used Drupal during the past six years owe a lot to those of you active in the Drupal community.

You can check out the release announcement at Drupal.org for all the new features and enhancements that have been rolled into Drupal 6. Let's look at some of the highlighted features in Drupal 6 which I've listed below.

• Improved Web-based installer - First introduced in Drupal 5, but not really completed until Drupal 6.
• Drag-and-drop administration - The drag-and-drop interface is available for blocks, menu items, forums, taxonomy terms, uploaded files, input formats, profile fields, and more.
• Actions and triggers - Customize how your site responds the way you want it to respond.
• Support for OpenID - With OpenID, login to all your favorite websites and forget about the online paperwork.
• Update Status module - No more having to check Drupal.org's "Browse by Date" tab to see if the modules or themes you're using needs to be updated.
• Improved theming - Drupal has always been a developer's CMS, now it has finally earned the right to also be called a themer's CMS. Theming for Drupal is finally in par with Joomla and Wordpress (IMHO).
• "Make your boss happy" security improvements - Password strength checking, Granular permissions, PHP input format secured, and a community backed security team.
• Performance improvements on the "inside" as well as the "outside" - For example, performance improvements in the past from Drupal's built-in caching were directed at those users not logged into the system (anonymous users). Now logged in users can also enjoy these improvements as caching covers them too.
• Usability taken seriously - Improved polls, forums, path alias managment, anonymous commenting, teaser handling (no need to remember <!--break-->), and more.

You can expect CMSReport.com to be on Drupal 6 by early March. In the meantime, if you have upgraded your site to Drupal 6 feel free to leave a link in our comment section.