Drupal 6 has come a long way from its initial version. And now I feel that it has finally completed to reach all the potential promised late into the 5.x cycle.

With the release of Panels, the last of the big 'game changing' features available on 5.x has been ported. This is an exciting time. Views, CCK and even wysiwyg api are miles ahead of what we had at the initial release of 6.0 and I couldn't be more excited.

CCK lets you create fields which allow you to split up content in more ways so it can be displayed easily in interesting ways. This concept will be introduced into drupal 7.0 core. Which means that the community thinks that this is important (and powerful enough) to change the way we think about content entry. This was released not long into early 6.0 but important still.

Views, the wonderful module that allows the display of information in interesting ways has also come out with a new version since the inception of 6.0 One of the most popular modules in drupal, it lets you build queries without having to write sql code yourself. Which is an excellent feature for non techie users.

Panels a module which allows for the display of content in interesting ways, without the need for mass amounts of custom theming, has also recently reached a new milestone. This module is quite powerful because of it's use of the context sensitive engine. This is a useful tool to use if you want to generate pages which have a consistant look but contain different information, and the information comes from a variety of sources.

Wysiwyg api this module brings common sense to wysiwyg in drupal. It allows for the use of multiple wysiwyg, and ties selection to input formats. Previous wysiwyg modules have not tied wysiwyg to input formats this led to confusing results when entering data, because the formatting didn't make sense.

As you can see there is quite a huge difference between what we had early in the 6.0 cycle and what we have now. And I am happy to say I look forward to what the future has to offer with drupal 7.