I am following the development of Drupal 6.x, much in the same fashion as a duck in the park eagerly swims along the shore, following the visitor it thinks will soon toss a few crumbs. Only that the crumbs in this case are PHP software, and they're awesome.

A few features I've noticed:

1. Teasers and Full content no longer have to be cumulative. It is possible for the Teaser to contain something entirely different from the first paragraphs of the main node.

2. A node can be split into teaser and body with the click of a button and some cool Ajaxy sliding of text areas. No more weird break tags in the middle of the node text, <!--comment-->, [bbcode] or <pseudotag>. Hallelujah.

3. OpenID support. I can log in to my Drupal site using my LiveJournal account. Oh wait, I log into LiveJournal about once a year and into Drupal every day. Still, this will be great once Drupal can also serve as an Open ID provider - all my Ermarian sites can work on a single login.

4. Version checking. Drupal modules are required to identify the core version they're written for, and will not be installable without matching the current version. This is crucial, because it is pain in the nether to disable a module through direct database access after it has broken the site. Of course, it can still break the site if it is badly written. But at least now you can no longer break your site by installing the wrong version by accident.

5. Inbuilt localization. Multilingual support is now in core, and it requires as little as a single file upload to add language support for a different language.

I'm still trying out what else is new, but it already feels like an early birthday.

(Well, not that early. Mine's in three weeks.)