Also as follow on, you'll find that the packages that draw community support also tend to have PPAs (personal package archive), these are very easy to add to Ubuntu these days and typically backport more recent versions of software to older LTS (and sometimes non LTS) Ubuntu releases.

For example I use the nginx PPA on some of my older servers and it supports nginx 1.11 on Ubuntu 14.04 even thought 14.04.4 LTS only supports 1.4.6.

apt-add-repository is what you're looking for.