I am hoping an administrator will answer this question for me.
Where is joomla going?
After a recent forum post asking how different 1.6 is to 1.5 I was shocked to get the reply I got from "realityking"
If this is infact where joomla is going then I am very concerned that this could be joomla's downfall. I know for me I just cannot waste the time teaching one version of joomla only to find that my clients sites need to be updated to a version that may require totally new components/modules or plugins.Joomla 1.5 is going to get support for 15 months after the 1.6 release, thus it will be supported until April 10th, 2012. Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7 will each be supported for 7 Months after their release, Joomla 1.8 will be supported for 15 moths and so on.
The reason why from time to time a new version is released is because it is required for progress, you can't add all the new features Joomla 1.6 has to Joomla 1.5 without breaking backwards compatibility. Also old and deprecated stuff needs to be removed from time to time else the code would become unmanageable and Joomla slower and slower.
Case in point for Joomla 1.6 all language files have to be redone because their format has changed, however this brings a major speed improvement because now the native PHP ini parser can be used.
I think everybody understands that a new Version is a burden for developers and designers but the transition 1.5->1.6 should be much easier than the transition from 1.0->1.5 was.
It is such a shame that components and modules are no longer available in the Extension area at joomla.org as I for one have a number of site still using the versions 1.0.x.
Is joomla really heading for this 15 month, new version, no support scenario?
