Today marks a milestone for the Drupal content management system as version 6 is released.

drupal.org | Community plumbing via kwout

Significant changes include:

• easier setup and installation
• drag and drop administration
• multilingual interfaces
• improved workflow handling through the use of actions and triggers
• OpenID support
• many improvements to theming
• enhanced security
• improved performance

Greg Knaddison has prepared a good screencast demonstrating some of the updated features.

New features in Drupal 6 (updated) | Mastering Drupal via kwout

For designers an important change is the introduction of .info files for themes, through which designers can define and control regions, features, stylesheets and scripts. This improves the separation between design and code, paving the way for smoother team interactions.

Work has already begun on drawing up a roadmap for version 7 with Dries Dries Buytaert’s definition of a killer containing:

• Better media handling
• Custom content types in core
• WYSIWYG editor
• Better performance
• Better tools to structure/organize content
• Basic Views like module
• Automatic upgrade functionality
• Improve node access system
• Better internal APIs
• Better external APIs (import/export, webservices)
• Usability improvements

Background information on this selection of features can be seen in Dries ‘ presentation on the state of Drupal at the Barcelona 2007 Drupalcon.