Please see http://drupal.org/node/311949 for back-story. Summary: "Unstable" releases are going to be periodic (probably bi-weekly-ish or as otherwise needed) "snap-shots" of what's in HEAD, intended for pre-alpha testers who want to provide very preliminary feedback, core developers rolling "epic" HEAD patches who want something that doesn't change every hour to roll against, and/or contributed module developers who want to get the jump on porting their modules against something that's not a constantly moving target. Drupal 7 is currently being developed heavily, and what is in these unstable releases bears very little resemblance to what the final release of Drupal 7 will look like; this is merely a tool for contributors to do their work more efficiently. Please note that these are called "unstable" releases for a reason. They are intended for developers only, or testers comfortable with things randomly exploding in their face. Do NOT upgrade your production sites to unstable releases. Do NOT expect APIs to remain frozen in any way between unstable releases until code freeze. I'm not going to even include instructions on how to get it, because honestly, if you can't figure it out, you really shouldn't be using it. ;) Now, that said, here's a summary of things that are included in UNSTABLE-1. For the full list, see http://cvs.drupal.org/viewvc.py/drupal/drupal/CHANGELOG.txt?revision=1.280&v... which I will try to make a point of actually remembering to update next time I roll an unstable release. :P For developers: =============== - SimpleTest module, an automated code tester, is now in core, along with a bazillion tests. These (should) now all pass, so you can use this as a guideline to know whether your patches / modules have broken anything. See documentation at http://drupal.org/simpletest. http://acquia.com/files/test-results/index.html for an idea of how our overall test coverage is coming along. - A completely new database API, known as "Database: The Next Generation" (DBTNG). This involves a lot of changes, so please see the docs at http://drupal.org/node/310069. - A "code registry" which is a set of database tables holding all of the functions in all of the modules, allowing files to be lazy-loaded. This requires changes to your .info files. See http://drupal.org/node/224333#registry for more details. - WYSIWYG editors now have a hope and prayer of integrating with textareas given the new #input_format property on textareas. - Image toolkits can now be supplied by modules. This is nice, so you don't have to do awkward copying of 'image.imagemagick.inc' into the includes folder. For users: ========== - Core now offers two install profiles: a basic one that sets up stuff like an "Article" and "Page" content type, some Taxonomy vocabularies, etc. The installer requirements check also got a nice makeover and looks more like the status report page. - Removed several modules and extraneous features: Throttle module's gone, Ping module's gone, access rules are gone, that horrible wall of comment settings is gone, etc. - Added drag-and-drop to a bunch of areas (poll results, languages, etc.) that missed them in D6. - Permissions now have descriptions, and node permissions are now sorted by content type rather than by verb. Known Bugs: =========== Plenty, but the most critical one is that you can't currently upgrade 6.x => 7.x: http://drupal.org/node/303889. Actually, I suppose this could also be considered a "feature" of unstable releases, depending on your point of view. ;) Over the next couple weeks, let's continue to hammer on http://groups.drupal.org/patch-spotlight and try and have some new exciting patches in for UNSTABLE-2. :) -- Join us at Do It With Drupal! A large scale, curated education event December 10-12, New Orleans http://www.doitwithdrupal.com