Why we like Joomla’s new release cycle, 1.6, 1.7, 2.5

Joomla has made a fairly major change in their releases cycle and it has gotten a lot of criticism.

In the past the Joomla team did a major release every 2.5-3 years. This often meant waiting a long time, even for features that were ready for use. Instead now they are doing an incremental update every 6 months, but for customers that wish for more “stability” or less change they are also doing a long term support (LTS) release every 1.5 years.

The biggest benefit is that companies may now take advantage of Joomla upgrades months (or years!) sooner than in the past, without having to run on a development version of the software. This is huge for anybody wishing to have a very feature-packed and fresh site.

Another benefit is more subtle. Each version of Joomla gives component/module/plugin developers new tools to approach the problems they will encounter. What this means for you is that you will find better, more powerful and more secure components/module/plugins in the Joomla extension directory. Another big win.

All this being said, it is still possible to focus on the negative aspects of this. The biggest one is that it increases the amount of time a Joomla user has to spend maintaining their site. For users who aren’t interested in the latest features that Joomla has to offer, they can still feel safe and security on the Joomla LTS release upgrading every 1.5 years. While that is a year sooner than the old “release cycle,” we feel this will make sense for most companies if they wish to stay current. For the rest … well, we’re glad Joomla is moving faster and feel that a stripped down CMS maybe be the way to go if you don’t want do have a small upgrade every 18 months. Also, take comfort in the fact that the Joomla team has made the upgrade processes much easier.

There’s another way to get through this, hire us! Our team has consistently been able to upgrade sites from 1.6 to 1.7 in less than 30 minutes. Even ones using custom components and custom templates. While this certainly will not be the case for every upgrade and every site, we do believe that over all the Joomla team has done an incredible job of making upgrades easier.

If you are worried about the upgrade process or you just need help getting the newest features you can, please feel free to give us a call: (209) 257-1706 x3