After six months of development, the Drupal team is proud to announce the Drupal 4.6.0 release! Thanks to those who contributed to this release, either by contributing code, testing the release candidate, providing support or writing documentation.

The key changes since Drupal 4.5 include:

• PHP5 support.
• Better search usability, improved results and relevancy.
• Personal contact forms for registered users.
• Improved multi-site support to run multiple Drupal sites from a single code base.
• Extensible RSS 2.0 syndication support for enclosures (e.g. podcasts) and categories.
• Ping Ping-O-Matic, to ping all major ping services.
• Usability improvements for permissions, block configuration, statistics tracking, logs, forum configuration, content administration, etc.

For a complete list, please consult the CHANGELOG. In addition to all of the above, we made significant improvements under the hood in terms of performance and better APIs. Contributed themes and modules have already begun to take advantage of these.

Download Drupal 4.6.0

http://www.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-4.6.0.tar.gz

Installation and upgrading

For instructions on installing or upgrading Drupal, please consult the installation documentation and the instructions carried out by the update.php script. Note that Drupal 4.6.0 requires PHP 4.3.3 or greater (due to the new search module).

For support, please consult the support page or read up on other people's experiences in either the installation problems forum or the upgrade problems forum.

Upgrading from Drupal 4.5

• For the most trouble free transition, it is recommended that you first upgrade existing installations to Drupal 4.5.
• Several files moved (or got removed) so it is recommended not to copy the new sources over your existing installation. Any left-overs might cause breakage so make a backup and start fresh.
• For the same reason, it is recommended to disable contributed themes and modules before starting the upgrade process. Upgrade them afterwards. Also note that not all contributed themes and modules have been updated to work with Drupal 4.6.
• As a result of the improved multi-site support, the configuration file includes/conf.php moved to sites/default/settings.php. If you had a custom configuration file like includes/my-domain.com.php, you'll have to create a new one in sites/my-domain.com/settings.php. Note that the new configuration file has a number of new configuration options compared to the old includes/conf.php. Consult INSTALL.txt and the default sites/default/settings.php for details.
• Because of the improved search module, your site's search index will need to be rebuilt. Drupal automatically builds and maintains its search index each cron run. After the upgrade, the search results might be inadequate until the search module catches up indexing your site. To see how much of your site has been indexed, consult the search settings page. To speed up your search index being rebuilt, increase the frequency of cron.php runs.
• If you had block paths configured on the block administration page, you'll have to reconfigure these after the upgrade.
• New permissions have been introduced so make sure to double-check your site's permissions. Note that the permissions screen has moved to adminster - access control.

Upgrading from the Drupal 4.6.0 release candidate

• Copy the new sources over your existing installation and run the upgrade script.

Usability feedback

Hearing what you have to say about the usability of Drupal 4.6 is very important to us. Therefore, we would like to draw your attention to the usability forum. The forum is not intended to report bugs but is meant as a place to provide us with usability feedback. If this is the first time you use Drupal, take the time to write down your initial thoughts and experiences, and make sure to share them in the usability forum. If there is anything that confused you or your customers, or that could have been more intuitive, we would like to know.