Drupal powers sites across the web, ranging from the personal weblog of Tim Berners-Lee, podcast sites like TWIT.tv, community driven sites like SpreadFireFox.com, artist communities like Terminus 1525 to large media sites like TheOnion.com, MTV and even sites for NASA.
There have been over 492 contributors to the Drupal 5.0 release
submitting 1173 patches, which is 150 more people than our previous
record with Drupal 4.7. These new contributions are seen in the major
usability improvements, a new Drupal core theme, a web-based installer,
and expansion of the Drupal development framework that will afford
themers and contributing developers even greater flexibility and power.
Download
http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-5.0.tar.gz
What's new
The Drupal 5.0 release contains many improvements, both visible and under the hood. To jump right in, check the videocasts about Drupal 5.0, including "What's new", "Installing" and "Upgrading".
The huge list of changes includes:
Usability improvements
- Administration pages: completely retooled the
administration page. It now has a default task view with an option to
hide descriptions (think advanced view) and a 'by module' view with
links to configuration options.
- Settings pages: settings are now split up into smaller pages, making it easier to find the options you need.
- Tables: the content, user and comment lists now include a smart 'check all' checkbox and allow range selecting by holding 'shift'.
- Capitalization and typography: attention has been paid to properly and consistently format labels and text across Drupal.
New features added
- Status page and requirement checking: added a status report page with detailed PHP/MySQL/Drupal information and requirement checking.
- Web-based installer: added web-based installer
that checks run-time requirements and that supports pre-made install
profiles or distributions with better support for database table
prefixes. It is also localizable.
- Core theme: introduced a new default core theme,
called Garland (and a fixed width version Minnelli). Garland uses the
new color module to change the theme's entire color scheme on the fly.
- Custom content types: core now includes part of
the Content Construction Kit and allows you to set up arbitrary types
out of the box. For more fields, install the full CCK package from the contributions repository.
- URL filter: integrated the URL filter module into
the filter module. This will cause web and e-mail addressed to be
automatically hyperlinked.
- Blocks per role: extended the block visibility
settings with a role specific setting and retained the option to
control blocks by PHP snippets..
- Edit block titles: Drupal 5 makes it possible to customize or overwrite all block titles, even set block titles to empty.
- User management improvements: Added support for
auto-complete forms to user profiles. The ability to filter users by
role, permission and status to help better manage users. Made email
verification of user accounts optional.
- Improved module administration: Modules are listed
by category and origin, their versions are displayed, and their
dependencies are listed in the module descriptions as required or
optional.
- More logging reports: Drupal now provides detailed reports on search terms, 'page not found' and 'access denied' errors to help improve your site.
- CSS preprocessor: All (cacheable) stylesheets are
now aggregated into one compressed file, which makes your site faster,
especially for first time visitors.
- Performance tuning: Key parts such as Drupal's session and access mechanism have been optimized for faster page loading across the board.
For developers
- JavaScript library: the jQuery JavaScript library has been included in Drupal 5. All existing JavaScript in Drupal core has been converted to use it.
- Reorganized directory structure: All modules now
have their own directory and effort has been made to split up resources
such as CSS by module. There is also a sites/all directory where you
can place your custom modules and themes.
- Uninstalling modules: when uninstalled, modules will be notified so they can clean up database tables.
- Pluggable cache backends: with Drupal 5 you can
plugin alternative cache backends. This allows you to use file caching,
memcached or other cache strategies instead of the default database
caching.
- Pluggable session handling: with Drupal 5 you can
plugin alternative session handlers. This allows you to use memcached
based session handling instead of the default database caching.
- PHPTemplate improvements: add the ability to look
for a series of suggested templates. Drupal 5 will auto-discover a wide
range of template files that allow you to override the default look of
various pages.
- Node access arbiter: made it easier for node access modules to work well with each other.
- Node rendering: changed node rendering to work with structured arrays.
- Form API: made it possible to programmatically submit forms and improved the API for multistep forms.
Drupal 
