After six month of development, the Drupal team is pleased to announce the that release 3.00 of Drupal is now available.

Drupal is known as a content management and discussion engine suitable to setup a news-driven community or portal sites. It is mostly used as slash-like weblog software and makes a great alternative for Slash and PHP-Nuke. It sure has a lot more features. Drupal has also proven to be a valuable building block and has been successfully integrated in sites like NewsIsFree.com and Tipic.com, corporate intranets, and - last but not least - it is being used as a personal blogging tool as, for instance, can be seen at voidstar.com.

Drupal 3.00 comes with major improvements and tons of new features as listed below ...

Drupal is free. All the code is released under the GNU GPL, and may by used without paying. Free support services are available via our mailing list and website on a best effort basis:

http://www.drop.org/node.php?title=mailing+lists

http://www.drop.org/drupal/drupal-3.00.tgz

http://drop.org/node.php?title=drupal+handbook

http://www.drop.org/node.php?title=upgrading+drupal

• major overhaul of the entire underlying design:
• everything is based on nodes: nodes are a conceptual "black box" to couple and manage different types of content and that promotes reusing existing code, thus reducing the complexity and size of drupal as well as improving long-term stabliity.
• rewrote submission/moderation queue and renamed it to queue.module.
• removed FAQ and documentation module and merged them into a "book module".
• removed ban module and integrated it into account.module as "access control":
• access control is based on much more powerful regular expressions (regex) now rather than on MySQL pattern matching.
• rewrote watchdog and submission throttle:
• improved watchdog messages and added watchdog filter.
• rewrote headline code and renamed it to import.module and export.module:
• added various improvements, including a better parser, bundles and better control over individual feeds.
• rewrote section code and renamed it to meta.module:
• supports unlimited amount of nested topics. Topics can be nested to create a multi-level hierarchy.
• rewrote configuration file resolving:
• Drupal tries to locate a configuration file that matches your domain-name or uses conf.php if the former failed. Note also that the configuration files got renamed from .conf to .php for security's sake on mal-configured Drupal sites.
• added caching support which makes Drupal extremely scalable.
• added access.module:
• allows you to setup 'roles' (groups) and to bind a set of permissions to each group.
• added blog.module.
• added poll.module.
• added system.module:
• moved most of the configuration options from hostname.conf to the new administration section.
• added support for custom "filters".
• added statistics.module
• added moderate.module:
• allows to assign users editorial/moderator rights to certain nodes or topics.
• added page.module:
• allows creation of static (and dynamic) pages through the administration interface.
• added help.module:
• groups all avaliable module documentation on a single page.
• added forum.module:
• added an integrated forum.
• added cvs.module and cvs-to-sql.pl:
• allows to display and mail CVS log messages as daily digests.
• added book.module:
• allows collaborative handbook writing: primary used for drupal documentation.
• removed cron.module and integrated it into conf.module.
• removed module.module as it was no longer needed.
• various updates:
• added "auto-post new submissions" feature versus "moderate new submissions".
• introduced links/drupal tags: link
• added preview functionality when submitting new content (such as a story) from the administration pages.
• made the administration section only show those links a user has access to.
• made all modules use specific form_* functions to guarantee a rock-solid forms and more consistent layout.
• improved scheduler:
• content can be scheduled to be 'posted', 'queued' and 'hidden'.
• improved account module:
• added "access control" to allow/deny certain usernames/e-mail addresses/hostnames.
• improved locale module:
• added new overview to ease the translation process.
• improved comment module:
• made it possible to permanently delete comments.


• improved rating module
• improved story module:
• added preview functionality for administrators.
• made it possible to permanently delete stories.
• improved themes:
• W3C validation on a best effort basis.
• removed $theme->control() from themes.
• added theme "goofy".
• collaboratively revised and expanded the drupal documentation.