The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Joomla 2.5.0.

What happened to 1.8? Well we skipped from version 1.7.x to 2.5.x. Version 2.5 is also a long-term-support (LTS) release that will be supported for at least 18 months.

Version 1.7 will reach end of life one month from today, on 24 February 2012. All users of version 1.7 should update to version 2.5.0 before that time.

For more information, please refer to
http://www.joomla.org/announcements/release-news/5403-joomla-250-released.html