One of the annoying things about Joomla sites it the fact you have to manually upload any update for the system. The result is painfully obvious: uncountable websites running unsafe installations because nobody feels the urge to upgrade (unless stuff goes wrong ofcourse).
It seems that Joomla 1.6 is getting auto-update support which means that updating a website is a mere press of a button. It looks like they wan’t to make it even fancies to allow plugins and components to check for updates to be sure that you are running the latest version of everything.
For those who can’t wait for fancy features like that by the end of 2009, you can get Advanced Tools for 1.5 now. This component has some cool tools but the real candy here is the Updater which auto-updates Joomla itself .
Note that you need to have write access to your entire Joomla site for this to work or you could use a small script to temporarily change ownership.