After an extensive testing period, the Drupal project has released version 4.4.0 of its open-source content management and community platform. The release of version 4.4.0 adds a number new features that improve Drupal's flexibility, performance, usability and accessibility. A list of the major changes and additions is provided below. For more information, please refer to the CHANGELOG.

You can download Drupal 4.4.0 from http://www.drupal.org/drupal/drupal-4.4.0.tgz.

Major changes

• Usability improvements: added breadcrumb navigation to all pages, made it possible to add context-sensitive help to all pages, replaced drop-down menus by radio buttons where appropriate, removed the 'magic_quotes_gpc = 0' requirement, added a 'book navigation' block, and so on.
• Accessibility improvements: made themes degrade gracefully in absence of CSS, grouped form elements using '<fieldset>' and '<legend>' tags, added '<label>' tags to form elements.
• All search queries are logged.
• RSS/RDF aggregator improvements: added support for conditional GET, added support for HTTP redirects, export feeds as OPML, added support for <image>, <pubDate>, <dc:date>, <dcterms:created>, <dcterms:issued> and <cterms:modified>, and so on.
• Comment module improvements: made it possible to disable the "comment viewing controls".
• Performance improvements: improved module loading when serving cached pages, made it possible to automatically disable modules when under heavy load, made it possible to automatically disable blocks when under heavy load, improved performance and memory footprint of the locale module.
• Theme system improvements: simplified the theme system, added many new theme functions and improved themability of Drupal, added avatar support to some themes, replaced theme 'UnConeD' by 'Chameleon'. replaced theme 'Marvin' by 'Pushbutton'.
• Added a file API: enables better document management.
• Added support for the MetaWeblog API and MovableType extensions.
• Refactored 404 (file not found) handling to support custom 404 pages.
• Documentation: added many PHPDoc/Doxygen comments.

Installation and upgrading

You can download Drupal 4.4.0 from http://www.drupal.org/drupal/drupal-4.4.0.tgz.

For instructions on installing or upgrading Drupal, please consult the installation documentation and the instructions carried out by the update.php script. You can also check the release candidate post for upgrade experiences of early adopters.

First, for the most trouble free transition it is recommended that you first upgrade existing installations to Drupal 4.3.0, Drupal 4.3.1 or Drupal 4.3.2.

Also, please take note that several documents (e.g. INSTALL, CHANGELOG, etc.), modules (e.g. import module) and themes (e.g. UnConeD and Marvin) have been renamed or moved to the contributions repository. It is recommended that you (temporarily) remove these files before you run the upgrade script.

Third, remember that contributed or third-party themes and modules developed for Drupal 4.3.x are not likely to work with Drupal 4.4.0. Developers that want to help update themes or modules can find a list of changes with Drupal 4.3.x in the Module developer's guide and Theme developer's guide. We recommend you to disable contributed themes and modules during the upgrade process.

No database changes are required for people upgrading from the release candidate.