Ooof.  I just read about the details of the new core vulnerability:

http://jeffchannell.com/Joomla/joomla-161725-privilege-escalation-vulnerability.html

Synopsis: If you have registration enabled on your site, this exploit allows an attacker to create a new user who is assigned to the Administrator group, with front- and backend login privileges.  Ouchies!

I've applied the 2.5.3 update using Joomla's one-click update button without an issue so far.  (But still, don't forget your backups.) Best of luck!

Hi Ho:

Just wanted to report that I've been upgrading my sites to Joomla 1.7, and all is going well so far.  I like the one-click upgrade!  (One of the few advantages that Wordpress had over Joomla is now gone.)  In the course of my upgrading, I have discovered a couple things I thought I would share:

• I noted that item identifiers in Joomla menus had changed from IDs to Classes.  This was a pretty simple fix in my CSS.
• I did see some language .ini files get overwritten, so you probably want to make backups if you've been customizing your language files.

Other than that, the backup went smoothly/as expected.  I haven't done this yet on any sites with lots of third-party extensions, but I soon will!

Okeley dokely.

I thought I'd check out the blogging tool here, as I think I have a couple Stupid Joomla! Tricks up my sleeve which might be of interest to the Joomla Chicago community.

I wanted to make this first blog post so that I could see how it displays within JoomlaChicago.com.  Sorry there isn't much interesting here yet: I hope to have some interesting things to post soon.