Our first Drupal 6 beta version was released just over a month ago,so given the large number of usability improvements and bug fixes thatwe've added since then, we're proud to announce the release of thesecond beta version of Drupal 6.x for your testing. This beta versionincludes all the latest security bug fixes as released in Drupal 5.3and 4.7.8. The first beta announcementprovided a comprehensive list of improvements made since Drupal 5.x, soin this announcement we'll concentrate on how you can help ensure thatDrupal 6 is released as soon as possible and is as rock solid as theprevious Drupal releases that you've grown to love!
The most notable change is that we moved the long time favoriteDrupal.module out of the Drupal package. It will instead be availableas the contributed Site networkmodule. This was done because Drupal 6 has a more secure and widelysupported solution for distributed authentication in the form of the OpenID standard.
We've also fixed a number of issues since the previous beta. Wefixed numerous PHP notices, upgraded to jQuery 1.2.1, included a moresecure solution for IN() queries, added schema based load and savefunctions, extended built-in AHAH functionality so developers can writeAHAH code without JavaScript for different types of form elements,merged .schema files with .install files, made it possible for themesto override core and module CSS files and made it possible to havecomment settings per node type, among a number of other improvements.
So when does 6.0 get released?Drupal 6.0 will be released after (a) there are no more critical bugs and (b) we've had at least one release without adding any more to the list.
When will that be? Well, it depends entirely on how many people chipin and help out! The more people help, the faster we can find and fixbugs, and the faster 6.0 gets released. The faster 6.0 gets released,the faster we can start adding new features to Drupal 7.0. So help outwhere you can, and let's make this the best and most solid release ofDrupal yet! :)