Unless showstopping bugs appear, Drupal 4.6 should be unleashed next week. That is, we are about to release Drupal 4.6 real soon now. This past month, the Drupal developers have been busy bees: they've poked at the Drupal 4.6 release candidate, turned it upside down, shaken (and occasionally stirred) it, dropped it, and still it held strong. As a result, we are increasingly confident that Drupal 4.6 is ready for production.

As soon as Drupal 4.6 is released and Drupal 4.6 sites are deployed, each single line of Drupal code will be parsed, interpreted and executed several million times a day. Take a moment to think about this. While you eat, while you sleep, while you walk on the street... every second... our code gets executed and exercised over and over again. For years to come. A good enough reason to give the pending bugs some last-minute love and to test Drupal 4.6 some more, don't you think? This is a call to all contributors in our community to make this happen and to help finalize what will be Drupal 4.6. For more information on how to install and test Drupal 4.6, consult the Drupal 4.6 release candidate announcement.

At the same time as the final polish on Drupal 4.6, the development branch opened up and new features and improvements are being considered for inclusion into core. We already have a number of improvements pending which we have collectively reviewed and tested during the code freeze. These and many more will start making their way into Drupal core as of tonight. Ultimately, they will become part of Drupal 4.7. During the development of Drupal 4.7, Drupal 4.6 bugfix releases will be made available as necessary.