The Drupal developers have been little busy bees ever since the new development branch has been created about 1.5 months ago. Those that do not track the CVS commit messages or read the mailing lists might wonder what we have been up to, so let me provide you with a quick run-down of the progress we have made.

Early on, just before the CVS tree was opened up for development, the developers were asked to identify the "smellier parts" of Drupal. As soon these areas were identified, we immediately began to tackle them. As such, the past 1.5 months, the majority of our time was spent improving Drupal's innards.

Here are some concrete things we have undertaken:

• The theme system has been refactored. We aimed for both consistency and ease of use. While we were at it, PHPDoc/Doxygen-style documentation has been added.
• Time and effort has been put into improving Drupal's usability. All pages can have breadcrumb navigation and all page titles look consistent. Furthermore, we replaced drop-down menus by radio buttons where appropriate, and got rid of the 'magic_quotes_gpc = 0' requirement.
• With accessibility in mind, we made the themes degrade gracefully, started grouping form elements using <fieldset> and <legend> tags, and added <label> tags to form elements.
• The Drupal menu/callback system has been extended to drive all pages, not just administrative pages. This is continuing the work done for Drupal 4.3.x which integrated the administrative menu with the user menu. We now have consistency between administrative and "normal" pages.
• We implemented performance improvements. Serving cached pages is up to ten times faster due to better module loading, and it is made possible to automatically disable modules and blocks when under heavy load.
• In addition to the Blogger API, Drupal HEAD also supports the MetaWeblog API and the MovableType extensions.

That are the main points I recall.