Open Source Matters (the organization behind Joomla! CMS) announced early this year that Joomla 1.6 was going to be out this year and we got the first stable release somewhere around Jan 2011. Everything as per the plan. But what did come as a surprise was that OSM was releasing Joomla 1.7 within the year as well. And then a Joomla 1.8 later. Later but not very late.

Joomla has always been very keen on platform stability. When OSM first forked off the Mambo platform to build Joomla in 2005, Joomla 1.0 was around for a period of over 3 years until Joomla 1.5 came out in 2008 January. The patch/extension support for Joomla 1.0 continued until 2009 before it was deprecated. Given that history, it is quite obvious that the Joomla community (or some of it) are a bit surprised about the aggressive release plan OSM has for versions 1.6 and 1.7; Joomla 1.6, introduced in Jan 2011 to be deprecated in Aug 2011 and Joomla 1.7, introduced in July 2011 and deprecated in Feb 2012. Quite obviously, 3DP developers have gone quite crazy.

As per OSM, Joomla 1.6 was meant to be a short term release. Probably the intention of it was to ready the developers and community for the slightly longer term 1.7 release. However, this is not how it was taken; most of the community (except for developers and implementors who've been around for sometime and preferred to stay on with the time-tested release), decided to implement their sites with Joomla 1.6. Web hosting services (such as Go Daddy) deprecated their support for Joomla 1.5 installations and decided to support only 1.6. And soon enough, all of these would have to be upgraded again to 1.7 and then to 1.8 come 2012 (or.. well, the world would've ended and we wouldn't have to worry about these things).

The good thing about 1.7 is that, as per OSM, it is a 'natural' successor to 1.6, meaning that almost all the extensions that worked on 1.6 would work on 1.7. Therefore this should be a matter of just uploading the updater package and unzipping the file right? Well, after testing out the upgrade process and re-testing the installed extensions, the answer seems to be, a simple yes.

As a 3DP developer for Joomla, we were very concerned about the release schedule of Joomla. We had many customers who asked us about the upgrades to 1.6 and quite a few confused over whether they should be installing 1.6 or just hang on for a while and straightaway switch to 1.7. Naturally we as a software developer, are determined to support all versions of Joomla (barring, already deprecated versions of course) and well, all these questions were driving us to the edge. But a month or so back, we just decided to take the plunge and start converting all of our extensions to 1.6 and then to 1.7 if necessary; and we were quite pleased to experience that in fact, we only need to make the transformation to 1.6, it does work on 1.7.

So as Kulendra.Net, we are proud to announce that we have started porting all our extensions to Joomla 1.6 and 1.7. In fact we have already ported Modules2Pages and CustomList4SobiPro in to Joomla 1.6 and 1.7. If you are interested, the scheduled plan is as follows:

• CustomList4SobiPro - for Joomla 1.6 and 1.7: by 01st July 2011: Completed
• Modules2Pages - for Joomla 1.6 and 1.7: by 24th July 2011: Completed
• Geolok - for Joomla 1.6 and 1.7: by 31st July 2011: Completed
• kBanners4Joomla - for Joomla 1.6 and 1.7: by 21st Aug 2011: Pending
• kBanners4VM - for Joomla 1.6 and 1.7: by 10th Sep 2011: Pending

So stay tuned to hear more from us, and of course, like always, we are quite eager to hear what you think about all this!