"Drupal 5.0 Beta 1":http://drupal.org/drupal-5.0-beta1 was released a few days ago. For me, this marks an important step for site maintainer. Not only the web-based installation system is now as easy as the famous 5-minute installation of WordPress, the module dependency system and module un-install system is much welcomed.

As the year is not 2004 and I haven't contribute anything to Drupal for a long time, I am going to wait it out this time for a release candidate before using it on ichris.ws. However, the copy of beta1 I'm now running on my test box seems to work very well.

So, how long before the first RC? The answer might be 3 months, going by recent history for 4.7 release:

* Beta 1 : 8 December 2005
* Beta 2 : 16 December 2005 – 50 bugs fixed
* Beta 3 : 9 January 2006 – 150 bugs fixed
* Beta 4 : 26 January 2006 – 120 bugs fixed
* Beta 5 : 2 March 2006 – many bugs fixed
* Release Candidate 1 : 31 March 2006
* Release Candidate 2 : 7 April 2006
* Release Candidate 3 : 15 April 2006