On Sunday evening, the PLT began its pre-release procedure in preparation of the upcoming 2.5.12 and 3.1.2 releases, originally scheduled for release today.

During this procedure, pre-release packages are posted to Joomlacode and made available to the Joomla Bug Squad for final testing. Typically, these packages are not visible to everyone. However, since there are no security issues included in this release, these pre-release packages were not hidden. This caused third party update services such as Akeeba Admin Tools to erroneously report that these releases were available and as such several hundred sites were updated before the packages were hidden on Monday morning.

In the time since then, additional bug fixes needed to be merged to the code base, causing a need for the release packages to be rebuilt. Unfortunately, there have been technical issues during this process, causing unexpected delays in testing and release of these packages.

In evaluating the current status, the PLT has determined that it is necessary to increment the version numbers for these new packages due to the previously updated sites and additional changes being necessary. Therefore, the next official releases will be 2.5.13 and 3.1.3. Users running their sites on the pre-release packages will not need to worry about any issues when upgrading to the 2.5.13 and 3.1.3 releases. Likewise, users of 2.5.11 and 3.1.1 (and earlier) releases will be able to update directly to 2.5.13 and 3.1.3 like normal. At this time, a release date has not been determined.

As always when unexpected issues arise, the PLT will review its internal procedures to ensure the lessons learned from the last two days are documented and its procedures improved upon based on this experience.