The "development" branch has more frequent changes, hence it's referred to as such.

The "stable" branch has fewer version releases, hence it is referred to as such.

New features are added to the development branch, and sometimes ported to the stable branch, sometimes not.

There are many large sites running the development branch, and quite a few running the stable branch, and still a fair number running a legacy version (0.5.x or perhaps earlier).

There are bugs in all of them (probably), as bug fixes are often part of new releases in both the stable and development branches.

I always run the latest development release on the forum, currently 0.7.58.

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Jim Ohlstein