We are proud to present to you the second release candidate of Drupal 6.0. Although there are still a few known issues that we are working on fixing for you, we are confident that our code is stable enough for wider testing by the community. Since the first release candidate, we have fixed various issues including the security fixes that come with Drupal 5.6 and others involving caching filtered content, menu item inheritance, missing breadcrumbs, better error reporting in the installer and updates, some translatability issues and lots of code style cleanups, and other small fixes. The most notable usability improvement since Drupal 6.0 RC1 is that the files directory is now automatically created in sites/default.

The first beta announcement provided a comprehensive list of high level improvements made since Drupal 5.x, so in this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure that Drupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as the previous Drupal releases that you've grown to love!

There are a number of modules already ported to Drupal 6. A list of already released updates is available on the modules page by selecting 6.x from the drop-down menu. For all other modules that don't yet have 6.x compatible releases, keep your eye on the modules' issue queues or on the Drupal 6.x contributed module status page to get an idea on the upgrade time-frame.

Status of some of the most well known modules: CCK developers are working hard on getting the module ready for a preliminary release within the week for testing purposes, while a final, stable release will likely be delayed until a 6.x release of views is ready for testing. Views is undergoing major changes, and will likely not be ready before the end of January at the earliest.

Drupal.org has not yet been upgraded to the latest Drupal 6 development version since some contributed module dependencies are not yet ready. The biggest obstacles to getting drupal.org updated are the 6.x updates for project module, and image module. Project module has also been making changes that will make it dependent on Views for some functionality.

If you are a module maintainer, now is the time to start working on the update to Drupal 6! Read on for more details.