Drupal 6.0 was released on the 13th of Feb, and in fact Drupal 6.1 is now out. I am asking myself two main questions.

Whats New In 6?

As culled from the Drupal 6 release page [1]:

Administrator Features

• Easier setup with support for multiple languages.
• Drag and drop administration. We love AJAX.
• Built in translation.
• Actions and triggers in core.
• Openid login in core. People with openid can login using their openid on any site.
• Update status module in core. When cron runs Drupal checks hte modules against drupal.org to see if new updates are available and notifies the administrator.
• Password strength checking. AJAX to show if the user has entered a strong password, and tips on how to create a strong password.
• Granular permissions.
• Path alias filtering.
• New poll module.
• Forum improvements.
• Email notifications.
• Better anonymous commenting. Drupal now remembers the name and email an anonymous user enters when they post a comment, so they only have to do it once.
• Better teaser control. It is now possible to create a seperate teaser for a post, or easily define where the teaser ends and the rest of the post starts.
• Sticky table headers. Table headers now scroll down as the table scrolls so you dont get lost on massive tables.
• Custom date formats.
• Pretty signatures.

Developer Features

• jQuery 1.2.3.
• Upgraded themeing system including:
  • Theme developer module.
  • Prebuilt template files.
  • Theme .info files to define region.
• New menu system.
• Better file handling.
• Extended logging using syslog.
• Schema API.
  • The Schema API [2] allows developers to describe their tables as arrays then perform operations on those tables via API calls.
  • Means I will not have to worry about Postgres SQL calls as much anymore :)
  • Will lead to form scaffolding and other features in th future.
• Batch API.
• Scripting from the command line.

Are the Modules I Need Available?

These are the modules I consider mission critical at this point. Im not going to research the smaller modules until we have Views, Panels and CCK available.

Views

Drupal 6 requires Views 2 [3], which is only at Alpha 2 stage at this moment. There is no upgrade path from Drupal 5 either. Still some time to go before this is ready for production.

Panels

Still only listed for Drupal 5, Im guessing most of the work by merlinofchaos is going into Views at the moment.

CCK

The Content Construction Kit is a bit of a mess at this point as its inner workings are slowly migrated to core over Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 development. The CCK and Beyond [4] page has a rundown on the current status and future plans for CCK. The CCK team is waiting on the release of Views for d6 before they can release a proper development version, although HEAD currently works well on clean installations.

Other Needed Modules

• TinyMCE
• image
• imagefield
• imageattach
• imagecache
• pathauto
• googleanalytics
• google sitemap
• ad
• multiping
• metatags
• service links
• devel
• privatemsg
• userpoints

Overall it looks like Drupal 5 is still the way to go!