Thanks to all the hard work we've done in the past three months, the next version of Drupal will have a lot of great improvements, including an installer, requirement checking for modules, a reorganization of the administration pages and file structure, a light-weight CCK, inclusion of jQuery and much more. We're also working on a new core theme (no guarantees it'll make it in time). With all that, I feel that, finally, the stars have aligned, and we're ready to call the next Drupal version, "Drupal 5.x". Thanks to all our contributors, Drupal 5.x promises to be an amazing release!
In preparation of the Drupal 5.x release, and as promised many moons ago, development of Drupal core is frozen as of today, September 1st. During the initial stage of the code freeze, documentation updates, usability improvements, and performance improvements will still be accepted. New functionality or API changes / additions, on the other hand, will not be unless deemed critical. Thus, as of today, the focus is to strengthen the code base's performance, usability, and stability. As we progress, focus will shift towards stability and, near the end of the code freeze, only bug fixes will be allowed, until no release critical bugs are left. As always, everyone is invited to help.
We can't say when Drupal 5.x will be ready (it's ready when it's ready) but it is estimated that it will take at least two months before Drupal 5.x can be released. During that period, one or more release candidates will be made available. Furthermore, a two month code freeze should give module maintainers plenty of time to upgrade their modules. People who maintain contributed modules or themes are advised to start updating them to be compatible with Drupal 5.x.
I'm sure that in the next couple months we'll be talking more about the new features in Drupal 5.x. In the meantime, the curious can check the updated CHANGELOG.txt.
