Joomla 1.6 Released.

Our migration policy

After nearly three years of development, the latest Joomla version, v1.6, was released in January. Having been through several version updates since initially Mambo, then Joomla 1.0 and then 1.5, experience has taught us to be cautious of jumping too quickly into early adoption of major new software versions.

This is for a number of reasons. Even after months of Alpha, Beta and "RC" testing, inevitably some bugs and flaws materialise once developers start to use the new software for real applications; and many of the third party component developers may not yet have released fully stable versions of add-in components.

Because of this we are adopting the following strategy for the implementation of Joomla 1.6:

New Sites

The choice of which system we use for a particular site will be dependent upon the "best" option for the particular site: for preference it will be using the new 1.6 version, but if the components to delivery the required functionality are not yet available or stable, we may be  forced to use the 1.5 version. As we know from our experience of the 1.5 launch, once the new final release version is released, the component developers very quickly upgrade their software to suit, so in practice means this probably means that 1.6 will be the version of choice for pretty much everything going forward!

Existing Sites

Joomla v1.5 is a solid and stable package with excellent functionality, so for existing sites we will not be recommending any sort of automatic migration from 1.5 to 1.6 unless there is any particular requirement to modify the site functionality. Upward migration is quite a significant task, and as long as sites running on the the current 1.5 version are stable and secure there is no obvious reason to go through the extra expense of the switch.

If at a later stage site changes are planned, then we will be offering upgrades as part of that process where appropriate.

As regards ongoing support, Joomla 1.5 remains fully supported by the development team until at least April 2012.