Early this Monday morning Drupal 4.7 was released. Since then, about every Drupal blog from Belgium (where Drupal founder Dries is from) to South Dakota in the United States (where CMS Report is based) has talked about the release. Here at CMSReport.com we've been testing Drupal 4.7 since Beta 1 and have been very pleased to see it through a mature released. The following "press release" was posted at Drupal.org :
After more than a year of development we are ready to release Drupal 4.7.0 to the world. More than five years, 13 major releases, 30+ servicing firms employing 100+ Drupal professionals, 300+ third party modules, and over 55,000+ Drupal powered sites later, Drupal 4.7.0 is finally here and it rocks!
Drupal is an open source content management platform. Equipped with a powerful blend of features, Drupal can support a variety of websites ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, interactive sites like Zimmer Twins, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, and even sites for NASA.
2005 has been explosive for the Drupal community. Drupal.org usage has almost tripled in terms of page views, downloads, and number of users, and with the release of Drupal 4.7.0 we are seeing this new found energy drive the platform development forward at an amazing pace. There have been over 338 contributors to this latest release with over 1500 patches which is almost triple our previous record with Drupal 4.6 of 523 commits by 50 developers. These new contributions are seen in the major usability improvements, new Drupal core functionality, and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.
The posting by Dries continues with a listing of some of the major feature additions and enhancements. While there are too many to list here, the top three things we like about this release are:
- Multiple Block Regions: Were you feeling constrained by only two choices for block placement? You can now dynamically specify as many block placement locations as you want.
- Free Tagging Support: Free tagging functionality is now built into the taxonomy system.
- Easier to Install and Upgrade Modules: Instead of having to install and upgrade modules by hand you can now simply just copy the files to the modules directory and Drupal will automatically handle the rest.