Over the past few weeks, we’ve released three – count ’em, three! – beta versions of BuddyPress 1.5. During that time, we’ve gotten some great feedback, and some great patches, from our user and developer community. With a clear mind (and a clear milestone), today we are releasing the BuddyPress 1.5 Release Candidate.

The “release candidate” label means that we think that the current codebase is rock solid, and this final stage in the release cycle gives users one more chance to find any remaining kinks before the stable release.

We’d like this RC period to be short – we’re as anxious for the 1.5 release as you are! – so please give the RC a go in your test environments, and try the latest code in a live testbed at testbp.org. As usual, we recommend that you don’t run pre-release code in mission-critical production environments.

You can download BuddyPress 1.5 RC 1 today, from the bottom of our Trac page.

In addition (it’s been quite a weekend): available immediately is BuddyPress 1.2.10. This minor update includes an important security fix, as well as fixes for a few deprecated function calls. It’s a recommended update for all BuddyPress installations. Upgrade through your WordPress Dashboard, or download BuddyPress 1.2.10 from WordPress Extend or BuddyPress.org.