After a year in development drupal 6 has been released.
This is a big day in the drupal world. This version of drupal includes many new features, makes developing a lot easier, and is much easier for designers to do what they do. This is by far the best version of drupal ever and is a strong step in Dries planned direction to remove the need for webmasters while enabling developers to do more faster.
Let's take a look at some of the new features that have me so excited. You can see the full list in the changelog and find a nice overview in the release announcement (which is the best looking one thus far).
Theming
Theming has made a huge jump in drupal 6. You can now have CSS only themes. The devel module now includes a themer module that's like firebug for drupal themes. Just about everything in the presentation layer is in a template file that can be easily altered. And, jquery 1.2.3 is included.
Translations
One of the biggest jumps in drupal 6 is translations. Drupal is now easier to run in non-english languages than ever. It even provides native right to left reading support out of the box.
Performance
This version of drupal is the fastest version ever. The menu system was rewritten to speed it up. You can optionally load include files based on file path right in the menu system. This is similar to using __autoload for those of you familiar with automatically loading classes in files.
There are new features to work with reverse proxy servers, be more compatible if your webserver is using compression like mod_defalte. Oh, and like the CSS preprocessing in drupal 5, there is now javascript preprocessing in drupal 6.
UI and Security
This version of drupal makes many user interface improvements and security improvements. For example, there is now a built in password strength meter. Drag and drop has not been placed all over the admin side. Want to reposition blocks? You can drag and drop them around the block admin screen.
Development
Developers get loads of new tools. Like a script that lets you run drupal from the command line. Built in batch processing for large jobs. A schema api which means you only create one database schema for your tables and drupal does the work to make it work in the different databases. Plus, there is validation checking when you insert data to the database.
These are just a handful of the features. There are more than I could write about in this post. If you have been curious about drupal now is a good time to check it out. But, realize that there are a number of top modules that will take a couple months to be updated and released for drupal 6 so they can take advantage of all these new features.
drupal updating
would you recommend updating drupal 5 sites to 6? provided the modules are released? or leaving them in 5 and using 6 for new site builds?
If Available
If the modules have released versions (not development) that you need for a site go ahead and update to 6. To become a release this went through a bit of testing. And, you can build your new sites with 6 provided all the modules you need are released.
For the sites I run it will be a few months before there is a release. I need Views, CCK, and the Audio module before I can update.