This is a follow-up bugfix release upon MMBase 1.8.4, since which more than 50 bugs were fixed and several wishes were granted. And also between rc1 and this release a few more issues were found and fixed.
 
One of the main new features in this release is a Javascript framework for the datatypes MMBase supports since 1.8. Using a asynchronous validation library (ajax) you can now validate form field inputs against their datatypes. See for example the taglib documentation and http://www.mmbase.org/mmdocs/informationanalysts/datatypes.html#taglib for more information.
 
The 1.8.5 version of MMBase is the first distro of MMBase which is partly compiled with Java 1.5. These are the following shipped applications: lucene, email, crontab, mmbob which are taken from CVS HEAD, and are no more maintained in the 1.8 branch of MMBase itself.
 
We don't build documentation any more, we refer to http://www.mmbase.org/mmdocs for up-to-date version of the documentation, or the build of HEAD for a downloadable version.