It is with great pride that the Joomla! community announces to the world the immediate availability of Joomla! 1.5 Stable [Khepri].  As a community of contributors, we have been through celebrations and tribulations. We have had fun, and we have worked hard. We have learned from and helped one another. What started two and a half years ago with a letter to the community has grown into a great opportunity for both the Joomla! project and community to benefit from these efforts and to consider our future.

People have contributed enormous amounts of time and energy to make Joomla! 1.5 what it is today. Developers collaborated over long distances, around the clock, enthusiastically contributing to Joomla!. Hours writing code combined with intense discussions on everything from usability to extensibility have defined many developers' lives over the last two and a half years. Countless others have identified and fixed bugs along the way.  Documenters have tracked changes to help make life easier for everyone who uses or develops in Joomla! 1.5. Translators for dozens of languages have prepared language packs.  Huge amounts of time and energy have gone into event organization, team management, and infrastructure upkeep.  Our forums are overflowing with those asking and answering questions about Joomla! 1.5, helping overcome problems and reaching out to newcomers in a concerted effort to be helpful.

Our growing and vibrant open source community is innovating in many ways. The response from community members in both development [Pizza Bugs and Fun] and documentation [Doc Camp] has been both overwhelming and warming. The Google Highly Open Participation Contest energized and excited mentors and students alike, while helping solidify Joomla!'s future by involving talented young people in producing and supporting open source software.

As an application, Joomla! 1.5 boasts remarkable advances over Joomla! 1.0 in the areas of extensibility, usability and internationalization. Building extensions is vastly easier and faster because of the comprehensive new API. The simplified user interface eliminates unnecessary clicks and context changes for site administrators and managers. Support for extended character sets, right to left languages, and translation of all static text in the front end and the administrator allows enhanced internationalization and worldwide use. New options for use of layout overrides and template parameters give designers total control over the look and feel of sites.

While this release marks a major milestone in our history, it also marks a new beginning. The next phase offers the opportunity to bring together the code created, lessons learned, and momentum gained, to build something truly great. It took us tens of thousands of hours, thousands of revisions, and hundreds of people to get to this point. It has been a remarkable journey filled with fun, discovery, and enlightenment where everyone has something to offer and anyone can contribute.  Come join in.