Drupal.org has announced that tomorrow, July 7th, Drupal 7.50 will be released, which is a big jump in the release cycle since we were already at 7.44. The fact that Drupal 7 is jumping so many versions is not a whim, but rather it means a lot of changes and improvements for this version of Drupal and in accordance with the six-month cycle for major changes established by the core team.
There are six important changes to take into account in this new version, for more information you can click on the link for each item:
- New "manage fields" permission for trusted users
- Drupal core will now be protected by default against clickjacking attacks (X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN)
- Added support for full UTF8 (emojins, Asian symbols, math symbols) in MySQL when both the site and database are configured to allow it.
- Performance improvements for drupal_get_filename(), it will now fire a PHP warning when the function cannot find a file (unless the new parameter $trigger_error is set to FALSE)
- Callable PHP functions can be used in more places in the Ajax system and in the forms api (php 5.4 +)
- When a logged-in user follows a link to reset their password, Drupal will disconnect them so they can continue with the normal flow.
Other features worth highlighting in this version are:
- Improvements for PHP 7 support (including all automated core tests)
- Improvements to robots.txt to help robots index CSS and JS
- Some minor changes to the translation interface
For more details on the improvements in this version you can see the CHANGELOG.txt
As for Drupal 8.1, there will also be a set of minor improvements that can be consulted in the commit log.