Take a look at the Subversion repository & notes.
Add http://dev.ellislab.com/svn/CodeIgniter/trunk to any subversion management application to download & review the newest unreleased versions.
No estimated date? I do not want a specific date, only an estimate.
I need to know if I can wait for the new release, or not, because I am starting a project already and now would like to use the new version, mainly because I saw that the validation process was fairly modified.
For someone technical, as it sounds you are, my advice would be to build with the SVN code available right now. If this is a mission-critical, ultra important project, then my advice would be to build with the stable 1.6.4 zip, although I have every reason to believe that 1.7 is solid and stable, parts of it haven’t been as well tested as the current stable stuff.
No date. Sorry. It’s almost universally been my experience that making those types of estimates has been a mistake - and the truth is that I really have no way of knowing exactly. The releases honestly do happen when the community and dev team think there’s enough new stuff in there, and enough changes to warrant a new version. Right now, there’s some really cool new stuff in 1.7 (form validation and session management are most notable) but there are many bugs in the bug tracker we need to hit first. You could accelerate the release cycle by helping verify if those bugs are legit, and offering solutions.
Thanks again for making CI so awesome. The updates have been very frequent and continue regularly. I started with version 1.3 in 2006. I never used PHP before trying it (used old ASP) and I’ve never made a site or application with anything else since.
You guys rock! Looking forward to the new libraries!