Upgrade Notice: Joomla 1.5.16 and 1.5.17

Joomla is experiencing an active release cycle. Recently both 1.5.16 and 1.5.17 have been made available. The 1.5.17 release was required to address serious problems in the 1.5.16 release. However, late code changes in the 1.5.17 release can still cause some problems with specific extensions.

At the same time, the new updates include fixes for some security issues that could put sites at risk.

We have responded to the contradictory need to simultaneously both upgrade and not upgrade by providing customers with our own upgrade packages. Customers on Abivia application support plans have already been upgraded to Joomla version 1.5.17.Abivia2.

Specific features of the Abivia release are:

• the security features of the official release are included,
• the problematic "disable plug-in on error" feature is removed,
• the user sign-up process has user-transparent features designed to reduce users created by bots, and
• an "exclude from selected menu items" module appearance feature.

Customers without support plans should consider whether or not they should upgrade now or wait for 1.5.18, which will address the plug-in disable issue and offer additional improvements. We expect the 1.5.18 release to be available shortly but have no influence over the actual release date.

For those wishing to upgrade now, generic 1.5.17 release packages can be found on the Joomlacode site.