Normally months passes by between new TYPO3 versions are out. But in between there are often a lot of previews, every week sometimes! Or you can upgrade your source on a development server continuously from CVS.
So what's the difference and what can you expect from them?
A “new version” is a new set of “official” packages including the source as tgz/zip, the testsite as tgz/zip, the dummy-tgz, the quickstart-zip etc. Such packages will be announced on TYPO3.org and found for download at http://typo3.sunsite.dk/.You can expect a “new version” to be tested good enough for production sites. (Still, make sure to read the changelog for “!!!” marked lines and make a test upgrade on a separate server first to make sure no changes affects your site negatively!)
A “preview” is simply a tgz-snapshot of todays work on TYPO3! You can normally expect these to work perfectly, but their completeness is not guaranteed to the same degree as with the “new versions”. The “previews” are recommended to download and test and give feedback from. Please see the section below for how to handle the installation of the previews!
