Joomla! 2.5 and Yireo extensions
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
Joomla! 2.5 will be released early in 2012 and with the coming of this new Joomla! release, the question is ofcourse: Will be certain Joomla! extensions be compatible with this new release, and what will happen with the support for older Joomla! released? To answer the question for Yireo extensions: As for know, we will change as little as possible.
Supporting the new Joomla! 2.5 release
We will try to get all our Joomla! extensions supported under 2.5 before the end of January 2012. This is actually only a little bit of work, because extensions that work on Joomla! 1.7 will work (in most cases) on Joomla! 2.5 as well. From January 2012 we will make all free Joomla! extensions compatible with the new updater-mechanism, so that updating Yireo extensions can be done from within the Joomla! Administrator. We will also try to make some extensions compatible with the new 2.5 functionality - for instance SmartSearch plugins for SimpleLists and MageBridge, QuickIcon plugins for adding buttons to the admin control panel, and probably other new features as well.
So in short: We will support Joomla! 2.5 as soon as possible. The other question is: What about older Joomla! versions? At this moment, Joomla! 1.7 is stable, but we still support Joomla! 1.5 and Joomla! 1.6. When Joomla! 2.5 comes out, we will simply drop Joomla! 1.6 support and a couple of months later Joomla! 1.7 support as well. But because the extension-architecture is not changed not much, our extensions will probably still work under Joomla! 1.6 and Joomla! 1.7, just like they will on Joomla! 2.5. No sweat.
Breaking with Joomla! 1.5?
Joomla! 1.5 is a different story however. The code-architecture is entirely different, and while all our extensions actually work on both Joomla! 1.5 as well as Joomla! 1.6/1.7/2.5 with the same code, it takes a lot of work to maintain this. So on the long run, we will be happy to drop support for Joomla! 1.5. The official end-of-life of Joomla! 1.5 will occur in April 2012, and we will follow this by dropping Joomla! 1.5 compatibility for new functionality in June 2012.
This means that there will be no problems in using SimpleLists, Dynamic404, TweetScheduler, GoogleTranslate, BingTranslate, PayPal Access and a great bunch of free Yireo plugins on Joomla! 1.5 until the end of June 2012. After that, newer versions of those extensions will only be made compatible with Joomla! 2.5 or later. New extensions will not be developed for Joomla! 1.5 anymore as of now (unless there is a big urge for it). We have some ideas for new cool Joomla! extensions, but those extensions will only be made available for Joomla! 2.5 and later.
What about MageBridge?
Our main extension-technology deals with MageBridge - the bridge between Joomla! and Magento - but we intend to change little about the current support. Joomla! 2.5 will be supported as soon as possible, and because MageBridge runs fine with Joomla! 1.7, we expect little problems with Joomla! 2.5. While other Joomla! developers have already announced the end-of-life of Joomla! 1.5, we feel that MageBridge support requires a different approach: While the subscription fees are small in the Magento world, they are high for a lot of Joomla! users.
Therefor we will not enforce anything upon MageBridge users that have purchased MageBridge in the last year to build MageBridge on top of Joomla! 1.5. Most importantly: Joomla! 1.5 will remain supported by us until December 2012. Note that the Joomla! 1.5 core will be end-of-life as of April 2012 so upgrading is advised anyway. But at least you're running MageBridge sites will not have to be migrated directly, unless you really want it.
