That's really your assumption. K2 is in the final phase of testing for 1.6 compatibility and will be presented in public on J and Beyond 2011.
You're right. It is my assumption based on that one post above. I have no idea about K2 for Joomla (I've been a user of the K2 template engine in WP since it's early heydays, so for me K2 is always a WP thing).
Your statement also shows you don't really know K2. K2's ACL has always been for the frontend and even now, far exceeds Joomla! 1.6's stock ACL options. K2's ACL is easy to understand and setup. Joomla! 1.6's ACL (for frontend options) is incomprehensible the least!
This is the exact same arguments made with phpBB2's Categories Hierarchy mod and phpBB3. It might be easier, more intuitive, really cool, whatever. What I read in the post saying K2 is removing support from J1.6 was that Joomla's ACL was encroaching on K2's turf. Joomla's response was pretty clear: K2 (and for that matter VM and other components) are building off of Joomla, not vice versa, and if components want to keep to that, they'll need to live with the changes and be involved in J!'s development process. Cringing every time a new X.Y version is released is not beneficial to any community -- sure, it may have broke something as no dev is perfect and sometimes core devs think that they've communicated well enough to everyone (i.e. 3rd party
devs) that something is going to change, such as the autoloading of MT in the backend (one line of code!) because it's not always necessary. The fact that 3PD were using that bug (which was filed in February -- 10+ weeks ago) to their sloppy advantage isn't a valid argument (caveat: there was a good argument that in calling JToolBar functions --- which depend on MT -- not working is). The fact that Joomla switched to a time-based release cycle also isn't an argument. It's a quick turn around, but they're not the first to do it (WP and Ubuntu, as I've already mentioned, have done it for
at least 4 years).
I fully agree with Max Milbers here. VM is a free product and the developers are not making any money off VM. Therefore they should not flip out and support Joomla! every 6 months. Support the LTS version which is 1.5.
And Joomla isn't a free product? Supporting the LTS version is grand, but that doesn't mean support it to the exclusion of any newer ones. As your first point has shown (and as I have been working on for the past 9 hours), J 1.6.3 isn't suddenly breaking things because of decisions to change the API. The 1.6 API has been pretty clearly defined and blaming 3PD bugs on the next API isn't an argument. I keep going through the diff logs to see where problems 'suddenly' come up and, ironically, it's not Joomla 1.6.3 (or 1.6.2)! Sure, Joomla changed some things from 1.5.x to 1.6.x and it might be just 'to use 1 new addition', but that's also why the timeframe is so short: each cycle adds 'only' 1-2 new features so that (1) it doesn't force a rewrite of a component every time and (2) end users see an active development cycle. Again, look at WordPress: they release a new X.Y roughly every 6 months. Every big release has a few new features, but nothing that really wrecks all plugins. Guess what? That's what Joomla wants to do!
Just to clarify, we did not "flip out" either when J1.6 was out. We run a poll and the VAST majority of K2 users said they were not "burning" to switch to 1.6. And that is true. Websites are not desktop computers. If something works just fine, there is no reason to upgrade it to a completely new platform JUST to be able to use 1 new addition only. That's insane...
Why do you keep saying 'flip out' that way (just curious as I don't see that in my posts)?
I agree that websites aren't desktop computers. My point is that if 3PD are always lagging behind 1-2 release cycles from the core, they're not going to get
new users. New users install whatever's current. I've seen this with the phpBB community and (especially) the Categories Hierarchy community. What's seems to be common in both scenarios can be interpreted as a step towards obsoletion because some 3PD think they're 'too big to fail'. Guess again. Someone else will (it's not a matter of if but when) start to do things faster and just as free, then we're left with maintaining and writing a component for ourselves and our own little insular group (which is what happened with CH, moreso when it decided to fork to phpBB2 into the still-unreleased CH-BB). Personally, I like VM too much to see that happen to it (and to see it happen again). It's that's crazy, then yes I am.
Home
Forum
Extensions
Developer Portal
