Joomla! Release Strategy
- Published
Starting with version 1.6, Joomla changed it's release strategy to something similar to Firefox's (see here for a critical review of Mozilla's strategy), with a rapid release schedule that quickly drops support for older versions. There's a pretty good review of what is known of Joomla's strategy here.
Version 1.6 was a huge change from 1.5. When I started migrating this site to 1.6 I decided the quickest route was to just start over rather than trying to migrate at all (a decision which explains why much of this site appears unfinished — it IS unfinished!). Most plugins have not been revised to work in version 1.6 even though we are on 1.7 already, a situation that really reduces the usefulness of the application.
That said, 1.6 is a big improvment over 1.5 and some of the need for pugins has been obviated by the improvements to the core application. The future value of Joomla will be determined, though, by how well the developer community responds to the update strategy. If plugins aren't updated along with the core or if better developers abandon Joomla for, say, Drupal, then Joomla is in for a rapid decline.
