The Joomla! Project has announced the immediate availability of Joomla version 2.5.6, one day after the previous release 2.5.5. Twelve issues were discovered and fixed in 2.5.5 including several that resulted in fatal errors of some kind.

The Joomla! Project has announced the availability of the security release version 2.5.5. While this is classified as a security release, there are also 11 new features added and 113 tracker issues fixed.

The Professional version of Akeeba Backup has provided administrators the ability to backup to cloud storage, including Amazon S3, for some time now. With the release of Akeeba Kickstart Professional 3.5.0, administrators now have the ability to restore from the cloud as well.

Many Joomla administrators who have already been installing and using Akeeba Admin Tools in their websites will be able to skip that installation from version 2.5.4 onwards.

The Joomla Project is announcing the immediate availability of Joomla 1.5.26, which is a security release update.

The Joomla! Project has announced the immediate availability of a new security update, Joomla 2.5.3. This update comes somewhat quickly on the heels of the release of 2.5.2, which was only ten days ago.

The Joomla! Project issued a thank you to the Joomla community last week for its participation in the Joomla Pizza, Bugs and Fun global party. The event is designed to dig deeply into the Joomla Core code in order to find bugs, report them and find fixes.

The Joomla! Project has announced the immediate availability of a new version update, Joomla 2.5.2. This update comes roughly six weeks after the release of 2.5.0, and over one month after 2.5.1.

While the full package is available for download, the one click update procedure from the back end Administrator is the recommended method for updating your Joomla website.

For Joomla users who are still running websites on version 1.7 and are not planning to upgrade to 2.5, the Joomla! Project has released version 1.7.5 in order to patch an Information Disclosure exploit.

Users are urged to upgrade to version 2.5 as soon as possible as Joomla 1.7 will reach end of life on February 24, 2012.

The Joomla! Project has announced the immediate availability of a new version update, Joomla 2.5.1. This update comes just a little over one week after the release of 2.5.0.

While the full package is available for download, the one click update procedure from the back end Administrator is the recommended method for updating your Joomla website.

The developers of the popular web forum extension, Kunena, have released a development roadmap on their company blog to give users and other developers an idea of the course that Kunena will take for this coming year. During 2012, the forum extension will be releasing new versions which for the most part remain synched with the version numbering of Joomla itself.

The popular Joomla administrative tool, Admin Tools, has been updated to include new features and address issues from the previous release, 2.2.a2. This extension allows Joomla website administrators the ability to perform certain back end tasks such as, "fix your files' and directories' permissions, protect your administrator directory with a password, change your database prefix, and set a secure Super Administrator ID." While this is an Alpha release, the developer has stated that this version is "stable enough for every day use." They go on to say that, "it's the only version of Admin Tools which you can use on a Joomla! 2.5 site." To put the community at ease, they note that they are using this new Alpha release on their own production site.

The Joomla! Project has announced a new security update release for Joomla 1.7 websites. This is only intended for users that for some reason are unable to update to version 2.5.0. Everyone who is able to update to 2.5.0 is strongly encouraged to do so.

The Joomla Project has released Joomla 2.5 Beta2 for download, making this next version available to developers and administrators for testing and for further polishing leading up to the stable release of version 2.5. The currently expected General Availability date is January 24, 2012. They want to make the community well aware that this new release is due out soon. With this release, the end of the development cycle is just about upon us, which means that version 1.7 is nearing end of life and will no longer be supported.