The Joomla! community has released a new version of their CMS, Joomla 1.5.3.

The Joomla! community is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5.3 [Vahi]. This release is earlier than scheduled in order to correct a database name validation error introduced in 1.5.2. It has been a month since Joomla! 1.5.2 was released on March 23, 2008. The goal is to provide regular, frequent updates to the Joomla! end user community containing the latest bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Latest bug fixes and enhancements in this release includes:

• Database name validation
• xHTML compliance fixes
• Help screen updates
• JFilterInput infinite loop fix
• PDF fixes for PHP 4
• Minor CSS and RTL issues

Additional information about Joomla 1.5.3 as well as goals for a future release can be found at Joomla.org.

Wordpress.org: WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

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I briefly wanted to mention that the stable release of Joomla! 1.5 has finally arrived! Needless to say, there are some very happy people in the open source community to see this version of the content management system go gold.

I haven't taken a serious look at Joomla! 1.5 since Beta 1 and Beta 2 were out the door. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to taking a look at the finished product over the course of the next few weeks. Until then, below is a brief glimpse from the announcement at Joomla.org of what you can expect from version 1.5.

"phpBB™, the leading open source forum and online collaboration system, announced today the availability of phpBB Version 3.0. This release includes enhanced collaboration features, better security and delegated administration features, extended support for open source and commercial database management systems, and optimisation for mobile devices and search engines. phpBB is available at no cost, released under the GNU General Public License."

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"Finally, after what seems like an age, the download page has been updated with the new WordPress MU 1.3 release.

WordPress MU is a multi-blog version of WordPress which runs on millions of blogs all over the world. The major blogging site, WordPress.com uses it as do many others."

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"Here's a breakdown on changes in PHP-Fusion v6.01.12.

New Features:

• Added double md5 hashing to user passwords for better security.
• Integrated new captcha include from v7.
• Tweaked clean url function to protect against UNION exploits."

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Last week, Plone 3.0 was released.  Plone is the infamous content management system that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.   The install of Plone is known to be very easy with Plone, Python, and Zope already packaged together in the installer.

Highlights to the new features/improvements in Plone 3.0 that the Plone team would like to stress via their announcement are listed below.   I provided links to further details on those features I thought needed a better explanation or were just too exciting to leave alone.

• Full version support, history and reverting to older revisions
• Improved performance
• Inline (Ajax) editing

"This is the biggest release of MT ever, a complete redesign of both the front end information architecture and the back end scaling infrastructure. The dozens of new features have been inspired by the outpouring of community support have helped inform our efforts: MT4 reflects what all of us have learned about how blogs work and where blogs are going."

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"The 5th and final release candidate of the forum project version 2.6 has just been released. It's been a few months of work and I appreciate the testing and feedback by the community. I'm sure there are a few remaining issues but it's been well tested over the past few months."

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Jaws 0.7.0 was released this week.  Jaws is a framework and content management system for building dynamic web sites.  New features in Jaws 0.7.0 include:

• Support for 12 languages
• Database support for: MySQL(i), PostgreSQL, MSSQL and SQLite!
• AJAX in all of the gadgets
• Better antispam support: Captchas (simple and mathematician), Akismet and extra tools
• Friendly URLs

Links for downloading Jaws 0.7.0 is available on the official Jaws download page.  The post at jaws-project.com announcing the stable release as well as the requirements for Jaws 0.7.0 is available by clicking here.