amejat wrote:
So here is the situation, Joomla 1.5 has been around since about a year with simply no plan from the development team... Unfortunately, Joomla is a great success and many people starting developping components and templates and providing websites to clients based on joomla... but since the first RC (6 months ago), what should they do ? Develop for Joomla 1.0.13 and maybe have to start from zero if joomla 1.5 finally comes ? Develop on joomla RC1234354454 waiting for RC1234354455 ? Or stop working for Joomla ?
So now announce a final version release, please, not a RC4 before a RC5 and a RC6 ....
i think there has been a lot written about this! the answer is
develop in the latest STABLE (Joomla 1.0.13) for any site that goes live
- but the beauty of a reasonably stable RC period is you can also begin to play with a development server to port so you have templates etc ready to port over when YOU decide to go with 1.5 and their wil be a good resevior of working extension.
You can do your research to find out which extensions already work well with 1.5 and use only those on site you intend to upgrade to 1.5 later.
If you know you want an extension that isn't in the already large library either develop one or use JUMI to provide its functionallity ready fro you 1.5 site. Its great that JUMI is one of those extensions that ports over easily the present stable to 1.5
1.0.13 is still an excellent tool - don't be afraid to develop using it.
And be happy that when 1.5 is released as stable it will do so with a fabulous array of native third party extensions and templates that work with it - as well as loads of old ones that work in legacy mode. Thats a very positive consequence of the approach the core development team have taken - which gives lots of time for developers of 3rd party extensions and testers to use the core code and expose any problems.
my approach now is to continue my old sites using 1.0.13 - but play with possible future templates and extensions on a development server with 1.0.5 so i decide what i like before i migrate.
with a new site i develop in 1.0.13 - but at the same time play in 1.5 so there is an idea for a site ready to migrate.
i have a couple of non critical sites (personal pages) which i have tried on a live server using 1.5 RC4 - they are working fine - no sweat! - but i don't mind if they cause me grief - they are part of my learning curve - and the content is backed up
As the team say - "when its done its done!" This is an open source project - not the commercial project where you can hire another handful of developers to meet a marketing deadline! I am glad the coding and the development of the project dictates the pace of the roadmap rather than the roadmap dictating premature labelling of buggy code as stable .
mark
Thanks to all who volunteer! 
Come on guies, this development process becomes ridiculous with 3 beta and now maybe 4 RC... and still no roadmap ?!