Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the most exciting beta release of Drupal yet, Drupal 5.0 beta 1! It fizzes and it whizzes so grab a copy of it here: http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-5.0-beta1.tar.gz It comes with many new features, including a web-based install system, improved administration tools, and a shiny new theme! There are also tons of under-the-hood improvements, such as the inclusion of the jQuery JavaScript library, node access system improvements (ACL), and many improvements to the Form API. Getting this beta nice and stable is essential to releasing Drupal 5.0, and to do so we need your help! Read on to find out how.... Everyone No matter who you are, start by either installing or upgrading the new version of Drupal (see INSTALL.txt or UPGRADE.txt for more details). You can use the development module to quickly generate a bunch of test data, or you can upgrade an existing Drupal 4.7 installation. As with everything still in development, we do not recommend running the beta on a live site. If you do, make sure you backup your entire site and database before. Newbies Are you completely (or relatively) new to Drupal? Or do you know just enough to be dangerous? Are you used to working with other content management systems, and willing to lend your perspective in improving the way Drupal works? If so, you're a perfect candidate to help with usability testing and improving documentation! Take notes as you're going through Drupal on things you find difficult or confusing, and translate those notes into an issue which will show up in the issue tracker. Make sure to be clear as possible about what the problem was and provide suggestions on how to improve it -- this makes it easier for developers to help! Testers Do people often congratulate you on your ability to break things? Are you a creative individual who likes to experiment with things in unconventional ways to see what happens? Do you enjoy looking over other peoples' work and picking nits in order to make it as good as it possibly can be? If any of these apply to you, you could make a great tester! We need testers both to try out different aspects of Drupal itself, as well as take a look at the issue queue to check bugs to see if they're valid, and also test patches to see if they work properly. Read more on setting up a testing environment and how to apply patches. Module and theme developers There is no better way to shake out any lingering bugs with the API and to ensure that your modules and themes will work with the new version of Drupal than to update your modules and update your themes! Make sure to file any bugs that you find! Drupal Ninjas and Ninjas-in-training If you're adept at Drupal hacking, or are eager to learn, a great place to start is with the bug tracker or the patch queue. Even if you don't have a full solution for a problem, often even a step in the right direction can be enough for another developer to take it home! Read up on how to create patches. So when does 5.0 get released? 5.0 gets released after a) there are no more critical bugs and b) we've had at least one release without adding any more to the list. When will that be? Well, it depends entirely on how many people chip in and help out! The more people help, the faster we can find and fix bugs, and the faster 5.0 gets released. The faster 5.0 gets released, the faster we can start adding new features to Drupal 6.0. So help out where you can, and let's make this the best release of Drupal yet!