Our last status update noted that July 1st was the code freeze deadline for new features to get into Drupal 6. While some of the strategic improvements that were close to being ready at that time got committed, we are now focusing on bug fixes, performance improvements, documentation updates and usability improvements.

We would like to encourage all users and developers to download a development tarball and test the old and the new functionality. There are certainly bugs in the code still, and we would like to squash them. Existing bug reports in the issue queue need some review. The patch spotlight page helps you understand how patch reviews work, and how can you help, if you are new to this kind of involvement. On the other hand, if you found a new bug, don't hesitate to open an issue and submit a fix. We are working towards releasing the first beta of Drupal 6.0 in a few weeks, which depends on how well the bug fixes go, so get involved if you'd like to see Drupal 6 released sooner.

After the last status update, we have made the following bigger changes to Drupal 6:

• Added update module to Drupal 6. This module helps users keep up to date with their modules, which helps prevent security and other kinds of problems.
• Made it possible to add any type of content into forums, not forum topics only.
• Added dynamic AHAH submission properties to Forms API, allowing developers to easily develop AHAH components without writing JavaScript.
• To work better with AJAX/AHAH, we made it possible to reattach behaviours to newly loaded content.
• Send mails in the language of the user targetted.
• Split several modules into smaller include files to reduce the footprint of Drupal, resulting in better performance.
• Moved several theme functions out to tpl.php files for easier PHPTemplate themeing.
• Themes can now specify/override CSS and JavaScript files in their .info file.
• Added automatic timezone discovery to user registrations.
• Changed all 'Submit' titled buttons to more appropriate actions, like 'Save'.
• Updated our jQuery version to jQuery 1.1.3.1.
• Fixed several smaller bugs: HTML validity, content permission issues, documentation problems and so on.

As usual, we can't say when Drupal 6.0 will be ready (it's ready when it's ready) but it is estimated that it will not be released before September. During this period, one or more release candidates will be made available. Furthermore, this code freeze should give module maintainers plenty of time to upgrade their contributed modules and contributed themes.

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x