The Drupal team has released the third release candidate of Drupal 4.7. Several new critical issues came up since RC2, but were quickly fixed. We also took advantage of the extended development time to get some more last-minute usability improvements in.

However, don't let this news of critical issues scare you. Drupal.org has been purring happily along on the 4.7 development branch for 3 weeks now without issues, showing that 4.7.x is a mature branch which has definitely left behind its growing pains. It's notable that today it's been exactly one year since Drupal 4.6.0 was released. This is almost double our normal release time and we will definitely talk more about this extended development after the final release. We definitely want to avoid such long delays in the future.

Again we invite you to help us test this latest release candidate, so that Drupal 4.7.0 final can be out soon. Drupal 4.7 RC3 can be downloaded at http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.7.0-rc3.tar.gz.

Release Notes

While we are confident in the stability of this release, remember to make complete backups of your website and database before upgrading. As always, you can find essential installation instructions in INSTALL.txt and UPGRADE.txt. More detailed guides are posted in the Installation and Configuration handbook.

If you maintain a contributed module or theme, it is definitely time to ensure your contribution works with Drupal 4.7. The Module Upgrading Guide and Theme Upgrading Guide contain a list of all required changes. Make sure there are no last-minute changes that you missed. Make sure your module is properly tagged in the Contributions Repository so that it correctly shows up as 4.7-compatible on the downloads page.

If you do find any bugs in this release, you can report them in the Drupal issue tracker. Please take the time to search for existing issues before posting any new ones. Finally, remember to supply detailed and accurate information with your report, so it can be resolved as soon as possible.

Drupal version: Drupal 4.7.x