pAfter nearly two years of development, we are proud to announce the release of the first alpha version of the Drupal 7.x family. This alpha includes a tremendous number of new features and new under-the-hood improvements for both users and developers. /p pWe revamped Drupal's user interface, added key contributed modules including CCK and ImageField, introduced a new object-oriented database layer, revamped file handling capabilities, and an automated testing framework based on SimpleTest, among literally hundreds of other improvements. Drupal 7.0 alpha 1 is the collective work of over 800 core contributors./p pstrongIt is important to note that this alpha version emshould not/em be used for production sites. We've resolved most errors reported so far, but emthere are outstanding known issues (including security issues)/em and most likely some problems that have not been reported as of yet./strong It is expected that there will be at least one more alpha version followed by a few beta versions and at least one release candidate before Drupal 7.0 is finalized. strongYou can help us reach the final release date sooner by testing this alpha and providing feedback./strong/p pa href=http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha1 target=_blankread more/a/p

Read more: http://drupal.org/drupal-7.0-alpha1