In preparation of the Drupal 4.5.0 release, Drupal development has been frozen. However, I'm going to make an exception for the proposed document management and theme system changes. We have been actively working on these, so they get a couple more days. I hope that we can get these sorted by Wednesday, if not, they'll have to wait for Drupal 4.6.0.

During the initial stage of the code freeze, documentation updates, usability improvements and performance improvements will be accepted. New functionality, on the other hand, will not be accepted unless deemed critical. Thus, the current focus is to strengthen the code base's performance, usability and stability. As we progress, focus will shift towards stability and near the end of the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed, until no release critical bugs are left.

People who maintain contributed modules or themes are advised to start updating them to be compatible with Drupal 4.5.0. We plan to make a release candidate available so early adopters might be trying your themes and modules.

Last but not least, in good tradition, the DRUPAL-4-5 branch will be created only when the HEAD branch is opened up for development -- typically, near the end of the code freeze.