In preparation of the Drupal 4.7.0 release, development of Drupal core will be frozen on September 1st. As of September 1st, the 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. After the code freeze, it will take several weeks before Drupal 4.7.0 can be released, however, one or more release candidates will be made available during the code freeze.

Read on for more information about the current status of the forthcoming Drupal 4.7 release.

Completed

The following changes are already in CVS HEAD and will be part of Drupal 4.7.

• Improved edit forms (auto-complete forms and collapsible page elements)
• Support for free tagging (folksonomies)
• Site-wide contact form
• PHPTemplate as default template engine
• Improved menu system integration (menu_otf module)
• Added Docbook and OPML export functionality to books
• Replaced the XML-RPC library by a better one
• Improved Unicode string handling API
• Various usability improvements
• Various performance improvements
• ...

Work in progress

The following key features are currently being worked on and need careful testing and code reviews before they can get committed. With your help, we hope to include them in Drupal 4.7.

• Configurable block regions
• Improved node revisions
• Advanced search features
• Atom parsing for aggregator module
• ...

The following key features are actively being worked on but are not ready for testing. Nonetheless, we hope to include them in Drupal 4.7.

• Improved form handling (Adrian et al.)
• Usability improvements (Kieran et al.)
• Upgrade system improvements (Neil et al.)
• Ability to theme administration pages differently
• ...

Note that these lists are not complete: more patches can and will make it into Drupal 4.7. Check the Drupal project issues to track all ongoing activities.