How to use SVN to download the very latest version of Joomla that's available, before it's released to the public.

The Joomla development team releases a new official version in average every 36 days: Joomla 1.5.0 was released in january 2008 and at the time of writing the latest version is 1.5.8.

Between one release and another the code is edited and those edits are available and published on the SVN server.

The SVN server (Subversion) is a system that enables to keep track of the progress and history of the project: thanks to this, everyone is able to find out

• the edits made to the code base
• which lines of code change between a release and another
• who made those changes
• when those changes were made
• ..and much more!

The Joomla SVN server is public, so everyone has the chance to use a SVN client and download the latest version of Joomla.

On this Wikipedia page you can find a list of SVN clients and a comparison between them.

Once you have installed a SVN client, you can access the Joomla server and download the code, using these URLs:

• Joomla 1.0 http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/releases/1.0
• Joomla 1.5 http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/releases/1.5
• Joomla 1.6 http://joomlacode.org/svn/joomla/development/trunk

using the username "anonymous" and leaving the password field empty.

I use the SVN integrated client of Aptana Studio, an Eclipse-based IDE that's really a great product for developing Web applications using PHP.

Here's a nice SVN guide.