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 5.0.0". Thanks to all our contributors, Drupal 5.0.0 promises to be an amazing release!

We're very excited (once again) about the direction the worldwide developer community is taking Drupal. We can expect more scalability, some clearer organization of the administration area (which has grown immensely with so much more power in the past couple of years), and a change in file structure that, along with some other changes, will make Drupal even more scalable.

There will be some nice new gloss in the next release of Drupal, with the addition of jQuery scripts [see Steven Wittens' post], more Ajax in various modules, some additional theme engine changes to empower designers even more (woohoo!) ... and possibly a new default Drupal theme, which will hopefully help draw more DIY folks into trying Drupal.

As soon as there's a stable release candidate, we'll start developing in Drupal 5.0 all new sites scheduled to launch after the official Drupal 5.0 release comes out.

Meanwhile, Drupal 4.7 is still pretty cool. (And, of course, we'll be doing upgrades.)