This weekend we attended Joomla!Day UK 2011 in London, a fantastic event for all things Joomla! and a great opportunity to network with other Joomla! users. One of the popular keynote speakers was Chris Davenport, who is part of the Joomla! Leadership Team and responsible for documentation in the Joomla! project.

Almost as soon as I wrote an article about the Joomla! migration to 1.6, 1.7 or 1.8, we have the first public release of Joomla! 1.7 made available for general use.

With the long anticipated release of 1.6 in January 2011 many people are confused about whether they should be migrating now, or waiting for the anticipated 1.7 release (July 2011) or even 1.8 (January 2012).

A long time ago I wrote an article explaining how to install an update/upgrade patch for your Joomla! installation, and while a lot of the information is still perfectly relevant today, I thought it was about time to write an update, given the wide range of technologies there are available now to not only keep your site up to date, but also advise you of any changes - potentially letting you know if something untoward is happening.

If you've secured your site using JSecure, you'll know that you need to browse to /administrator/?keyword to access your admin back-end.  What happens if you forget the keyword, or something goes wrong with the jSecure plugin?

NOTE: THIS ARTICLE HAS AN UPDATE AVAILABLE HERE

The number of people I see posting on forums asking for support on components who are running versions of Joomla! sometimes 4 or more versions out of date is really quite alarming - when I point out to them the error of their ways, often the first question is "Well how do I upgrade to the latest version?".  Hopefully this article should help clarify the process involved with installing the latest patches for Joomla! and help you stay up to date!

Joomla! docs has a full walk-through of this process, which is where most of the information in this article is from.