Hello World, Drupal 6 beta 4 is planned to be released this Wednesday. Sorry for the small delay (it was actually promised to be out at the end of the previous week or earlier this week), but we do a coordinated release with security fixes included. Thankfully this short delay allows us to fix even more critical bugs in this (hopefully) last beta version. http://drupal.org/project/issues?projects=3060&versions=97368,184399,175832&... There are 11 open critical bugs and 1 open critical task. The sooner we solve these, the sooner we get Drupal 6 out and the sooner we can add new features to Drupal (7). I know how many of you would love to do new features, and so do I. Please understand that it is quite hard to say no to cool new stuff, but we need to focus entirely on fixing bugs, or otherwise we are just moving around in a circle instead of going forward. (Most cool new stuff patches introduced bugs some of which we still are about to resolve, and introducing new bugs at this stage is no fun). As I said earlier, the mostly constant state of the critical queue (ie. no new bugs getting in) looks like a good sign of the system going strong. So the next step is hopefully an RC1. I hope that we can reach this stage sooner then later. We have been in feature freeze mode for long enough that your frustrations about not getting shiny new features into the release can be turned into feverish bug fixing in the criticals queue. Unfortunately the constant state of the criticals queue (ie. not much progress on the issues) also tells us that not many people find this bug hunting that fun. But thankfully most issues are awaiting your testing and reviews, so you don't need to be the bug hunter. Testing patches is easy! :) Until the RC1 hits the website, string modifications are also accepted in the name of usability improvements. After that, the interface strings are frozen, and translators will be asked to start translations. We changed lots of stuff since Drupal 5, even through the betas, so poor translators will have quite some work to do. Hopefully everything changes for the better. Summary: - do not work on big new stuff and/or behavior modifications for Drupal 6, unless fixing a critical **bug** - if you'd like to help Drupal 6 getting out, focus on the issues on the link above - unless major bugs appear, we plan to move on to RC1 (this could be in a few days to a week or two) - translators hold off your work still for a short while until RC1 Ps. I created an unpublished release announcement for beta 4, which privileged users can go and edit, if you think anything needs to be fixed. It is in full HTML mode as all the previous announcements. Don't forget about switching on saving a new revision, when you edit the node: http://drupal.org/drupal-6.0-beta4 Happy bug fixing to all! Gabor