Over the past weeks, Drupal HEAD has become increasingly more stable. That is not to say that everything is well tested or that there are no bugs left. Fact is that the changes have been less intrusive as of late which probably marks a good time to discuss what lies ahead.

As it stands, I would like to freeze the current development branch on February 15. This would leave us approximately one month to add new features and to refactor existing code before we get to the serious stabilizing and debugging work required to deliver Drupal 4.4.0. Any thoughts? Any last-minute features you plan to work on?

For those that don't track the development, here is a list of the most significant changes that hit CVS the past month:

• A file API to enable the development of better file and document management. Those who maintain a module with custom file handling code are encouraged to migrate to the new file API.
• Several RSS aggregator improvements. Drupal's news aggregator now supports conditional GETs as well as several new tags like <image>, <pubDate>, <dc:date>, <dcterms:created>, <dcterms:issued> and <dcterms:modified>. The aggregator pages have also been revamped and RSS feeds can be exported using OPML.
• We refactored the 404 (file not found) handling to support custom 404 pages.
• Effort is put in improving the developer documentation.
• Theme UnConeD has been replaced by a new theme called Chameleon and theme Marvin's code has been updated to use less tables and embrace CSS.
• We improved the performance and memory footprint of the locale module.

See also: previous development update.