As previously announced, there will be a Drupal 7 core bug fix/feature release this week (alongside the upcoming Drupal 8 patch release).

The release will be labeled Drupal 7.50 (which is a version jump compared to the current 7.44 release); this is to indicate that this release, although still part of a stable release series, is a bit larger than normal and makes a few more changes and new features available than normal.

The release is expected on Thursday, July 7 to give a bit more time for final testing.

The final patches for Drupal 7.50 have been committed and the code is frozen (excluding documentation fixes, fixes for any regressions that may be found in the next couple days, and changes/additions to "experimental" features not yet intended for production sites). So, now is a wonderful time to update your development/staging servers to the latest 7.x code and help us catch any regressions in advance.

There are six relevant change records for Drupal 7.50 which are listed below. This is not the full list of changes, rather only a list of notable API additions and other changes that might affect individual sites or particular contributed modules, so it's a good place to start looking for any problems:

• New "administer fields" permission added for trusted users
• Drupal 7 core is now protected against clickjacking by default (X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN)
• Added support for full UTF-8 (emojis, Asian symbols, mathematical symbols) on MySQL and other database drivers when the site and database are configured to allow it
• Performance improvements for drupal_get_filename(), which will now trigger a PHP warning when it can't find a file (unless the new $trigger_error parameter is set to FALSE)
• PHP callables can be used in more places in the Ajax system and form API (for PHP 5.4 and higher)
• Users are now logged out automatically when following a password reset link

Other highlights of the release include improved support for PHP 7 (including all Drupal core automated tests now passing for PHP 5.4+ and PHP 7), improvements to robots.txt to help search engines which index your site's images/CSS/JavaScript, and of course a variety of important bug fixes. Translators might also want to be aware of a few administrative-facing translatable string changes and additions in this release.

For more information on the release, see the tentative CHANGELOG.txt for Drupal 7.50, the corresponding list of important issues that will be highlighted in the Drupal 7.50 release notes, and the full list of changes in the Drupal 7 commit log.

If you do find any regressions, please report them in the issue queue. Thanks!

Note: Our recently-added Drupal 7 co-maintainers (stefan.r and Fabianx) and I will consider continuing to do larger Drupal 7 releases like this one every six months or so (in keeping with Drupal's new release cycle), if there is interest and continued contributions from the community. See the ongoing discussion for further details.