Now and then the Mambo team publishes patches, especially when serious bugs or security gaps have been discovered in the system. This can result in completely new distributions of the Mambo system or in smaller patch packs. The latter look mainly as you see in Figure 11.6; only the new and modified files are delivered:

Figure 11.6: The content of a Mambo patch pack: only the modified files

You simply unpack the new files in the Mambo directory and you have the newest version. Note that if you have made changes to Mambo, these changes are sometimes lost. So first check as to which files have changed. And if this affects your modified files, determine laboriously what changes the Mambo developers have made and how you can merge these with your improvements.

For example, with updates of version 4.5.x to 4.6.x, the situation is somewhat different, since you naturally want to preserve your stored data. Therefore we recommend the following procedure: