Last week Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of Drupal 5 was released. The core Drupal development team made some HUGE improvements in the organization of the administration tools dividing them between Content management, Site building, Site configuration, and User management.

By the end of the week, I have to choose between Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 to build a site that will beta in January and go live to the public in February. I'm looking for feedback on the age old question of going with the known, stable framework or the exciting, new framework. Since the task of maintaining content and users is going to fall on the cohort of grad students studying interactive journalism, the improvements to the admin interfaces should reduce the amount of help the faculty and students need from me to run their site.

Drupal 5 includes JQuery, making it easier for developers to add AJAX functionality like Netflix-esque Fivestar module.

Michelle Cox has posted timeline for updating the popular 4.7 modules to work with Drupal 5. Notice the number of modules marked "Not started until after RC". The question I have to answer this week is, how long will it take to update the modules I absolutely need to work with 5? Are the improvements in Drupal 5 worth waiting for module developers to update their code... or taking on the burden of updating the module myself?