VM2 and j1.6

[freeme]

I am not a developer, so my simple question:

How will that be handled in general? I assume 1.6 is a milestone, so if your extension runs on 1.6., it will also be compatible with the next upcoming versions - right? Anything else wouldnt make sense at all...

As this might be the point, it for sure makes sense to adopt extensions to 1.6., as then the major work is already done for 1.7. & 1.8, etc. - until a new major release is coming, whenever that is. Right?

[beipink]

@impleri Really... whatever...

Sorry for the intromission here. Why such arrogance? I guess you have a different opinion but impleri made some fair points there.
I also thought that would  make more sense for VM2.0 to support 1.6+  versions of joomla rather than 1.5 which is already well supported by VM1.1
Considering that within 12months or less (according to joomla.org) support will be dropped for version 1.5 of joomla.
i might be completely wrong here but in my opinion sooner they support the new version better it is for VM  surviving in the future. As impleri, rightly, mentioned competition can come from everywhere any moment.

[jenkinhill]

beipink, Joomla 1.7 is to be released on 10 July 2011 ( http://community.joomla.org/blogs/leadership/1442-wanted-new-features-for-version-17.html ). Joomla 1.6 is only to be officially supported until August 2011. J1.7 is supported until February 2012 as Joomla 1.8 (which is the next long term supported version) is to be released in January 2012. Joomla 1.5 is to be supported until April 2012, which is beyond the end of support for 1.6 and 1.7

This 6 monthly development cycle will be an issue for developers of many components to keep up with, so Joomla developers have built long term supported versions into the cycle, to be released every 18months.

Long Term Support

Every third major or minor release will be classified as a long term support release (LTS). These releases are officially supported until three months after the general availability milestone of the next long term support release. The longer support schedule is aimed at making transitions for users who seek a longer, more stable release cycle where eighteen months before a major software update makes considerably more sense than six months.

The present unease from developers is related to the release of J1.6.2 which broke many components and commercial templates, suggesting inadequate testing. So 1.6.3 was rushed out, but not before some template suppliers, for example, had started rebuilding their code to work with 1.6.2

VirtueMart will be available and working on on future Joomla versions, but my guess, as J1.7 is to be released in just over 2 months, is that 1.7 should be the version to aim at, but 1.7 won't be available for testing until some time in June.

Important thing to me is to see VM2 working with Joomla1.5 initially and then make whatever changes needed to work with future Joomla versions.

Note that I am not a member of the development team, but try to keep up with what is happening here and in the Joomla world at large.

[Milbo]

You are not part of the development team, but you are part of the team and explained perfectly how we want to handle it.

[beipink]

VirtueMart will be available and working on on future Joomla versions, but my guess, as J1.7 is to be released in just over 2 months, is that 1.7 should be the version to aim at, but 1.7 won't be available for testing until some time in June.

Absolutely no problem with this.

To be fair, that was my opinion rather than a suggestion to what should be done. It is based on my understanding of J1.5 and J1.6. They appear to be 2 different products to me.

I try myself to follow everything what's going on with Joomla and VM world and I have to admit I'm kind of disappointed about some choices made by the Joomla Team. (ie making 6 months releases is good breaking compatibility every 6 months or less is not)

Thank you for your effort to both of you Kelvyn and Max.

[Bruce Morgan]

Frankly, I think the "Joomla Road Map" is a train wreck waiting to unfold.  I was intially excited about J1.6 but the mixed signals from Joomla are scaring people away.  I have no concept of what is driving those decisions.

As for VM, I think a new major release could be exciting.  I am not enthralled with bells and whistles, I am looking for rock solid stability, security and enough functions right out of the box that I can forever more dump the hack that i have been forced to adopt to make a user-friendly and functional site.  Lastly, I would like to see more ability to configure the look and output from admin selectable paerameter tha may be selected from the backend rather than from within the source code.

In summary I think Joomla has already blown it with J1.6.x so let's not let their indecision delay work on a better VM product.  I am not part of the development team and am not even a programmmer, but I do run my own web site and try and my modest little site does not have the resources to hire outside programming help on a regular basis.  I think ther are a lot of users like myself. Keep up the good work.

Bruce
www.pepper-passion.com

[Cergorach]

If there is indeed little support from third party developers, I don't see much use for developing/deploying websites in Joomla! 1.6 (or 1.7), especially when (security) updates might actually break a site. An added advantage is that 1.5 will at least be supported until the end of April 2012 (and probably longer if the 2.0 final release will be anything like the 1.6 final release). And even more important, the policy of the Joomla! developers might change again in the coming year and provide us with even longer support for 1.5.

While the time until 1.5 is EOL and 2.0 is available might not be the longest period of time. It might also be a good time for both developers and folks that design/deploy websites to look outside of their Joomla! box. Wordpress, Drupal and Plone are both very popular CMS platforms, I've been meaning to take a serious look at them all and now might be the perfect time to do just that.

I'm just disappointed in Joomla! at the moment, the features that where promised for 1.6 were great, but the dependability of the releases after the final doesn't create a lot of trust in the Joomla! platform. From what I'm gathering of the plans for 1.6 and 1.7, these need to be skipped and three months for migrating from 1.5 to 2.0 is just not long enough imho. What should I advise a client in June/July 2010? Wait six months and hope that 2.0 is ready for release on time, or inform them that they'll need to upgrade their whole site in another nine months and add another significant cost to their website. A lot of companies/organizations that use Joomla! for their websites don't have that kind of budget. If migration from 1.0 to 1.5 was any indication, that wasn't two hours work to migrate everything seamlessly, especially not if your using a lot of components/plugins, etc.

[impleri]

Cergorach, don't forget that WordPress has a similar 6-month release cycle minus a LTS version (and has for years!).

A few additional points:
1. While maintaining an LTS release is a good idea, it won't help get new users who want the most recent stable versions of everything. I've seen what happens when 3rd party devs don't 'keep up' with the platform's release cycle (i.e. perception should be a huge concern).

2. Now that the RC has been released, I'm back to getting VM2 working with J1.6. I'm finding that most of it is working perfectly. Some bugs are because code written at the beginning of the VM2 rewrite didn't utilise the 1.5 API to its full extent (or used methods which were in j1.5 for easier adaption from j1.0). Heck, there's still a lot of old PHP4 assign-by-reference =& syntax (which was deprecated in PHP5). I am certain that I'll (and if any of the other devs still are interested, we'll) be able to get the stable release of VM2 working with J1.6.

3. A lot of people are saying the changes from j1.5 to j1.6 for end-users is on the same level of time-consuming as the migration from j1.0 to j1.5. I don't think so. The biggest time is spent in devs adapting things to 1.6. End users shouldn't have any issue (I've now migrated a few corporate sites with complicated setups a few times). Further, since Joomla has a time-sensitive release cycle, newer releases will be even easier (just as the individual upgrades in WP from 2.4 -> 2.5 -> 2.6, etc). Companies won't be needing to invest significant time for any single upgrade after 1.6 because of the time-based release cycle. It took Joomla devs years to go from 1.0 to 1.5 (and years again from 1.5 to 1.6!). That amount of change won't happen in a 6 month release cycle. It will, however, happen over 18 months (i.e. in Joomla's LTS releases). In the end, it'll be a wash: either spend a few short periods of time with each release or a single long period of time with each LTS release.

[Stefanos]

We are "following" VirtueMart because we love it, as well as it's community. I am currently on j1.5 and waiting for things to get stable with j17 or whatever, in order start thinking of upgrading cause it takes time and a lot of work even for "simple" webmasters.

I only posted here to say this, that we love vm, it's founder, and all it's developers etc.

peace

[Cergorach]

impleri, as I said, haven't looked at them in detail yet. And my issue isn't the six month release schedule, it's that 1.6.x or 1.7.x security/bugfix releases might have a serious impact on installed components, plugins, etc. Not only that, but that some major developers are not really supporting 1.6.x, that is a major problem imho. It's great that you are still dedicated to supporting VM for 1.6, I wish everyone was that dedicated. But what I read from other blogs, it's almost an unsupportable situation for some: https://www.akeebabackup.com/home/item/1093-joomla-16-will-be-partially-supported.html
Akeeba Backup is a very important package for a lot of websites, because not many webhosters provide adequate backup features themselves (especially not for the databases). "Operational issues due to the ever changing API." does not generate a great deal of trust in me (or my clients) for 1.6 or 1.7. Stability is more important then feature set in most professional cases.

An LTS release is great for all those folks that want to get a simple website out of the door without having an upgrade every six months. You have to understand that a lot of the Joomla content contributors aren't very happy with changes to how things work, how they look or where they are located.

The situation I'm afraid of is the following:
- We have a fully working Joomla! 1.6.x website with all the components working perfectly.
- Then there is a Joomla! 1.6.x+1 release that fixes a (few) critical security issues, but it also changes something in the API and it breaks a critical (for the website) 3rd party component. A fix for the component can take up to two months to be released. Then I have three options:
1.) Don't deploy Joomla! security fix and play Russian roulette with hackers, if the site is hacked I will be blamed and when I explain things, I AND Joomla! will be blamed.
2.) Deploy Joomla! security fix and the critical component breaks, ideally it just doesn't function, worst case it completely screws up the website and does bad things with the data. I will be blamed and when I explain things, I AND Joomla! will be blamed.
3.) Pay the/a developer money to fix the component asap, that might be doable if the amount of money isn't breaking the bank and it's a component that is used in a lot of sites (Akeeba Backup for example). But if you have multiple components breaking on a single site, this isn't really an option because you have clients that didn't expect additional fees (especially not high ones) and someone providing support can't absorb the costs without going bankrupt, especially if it happens a few times over the next year.

The upgrades for 1.5 => 1.6 might not be as significant as 1.0 => 1.5, but you still need to do a test migration, check everything, deploy, check everything. And that is only with the Joomla core, chances are that you'll need to do some work on the template and install new versions of most of the components if they even have 1.6 versions (there are component builders that have already stated that they won't support 1.6 for the reasons given above). Some components need to be completely reconfigured and if your particularly unlucky rebuild all of the content (some of the forms components might require that). Doing this two times in the coming nine months doesn't excite many companies. Sure, many 'simple' websites won't have many problems.

I would like to see a year of security fixes for the previous LTS after the release of the new LTS, that should give folks a larger migration window for those that stick with the LTS releases.

What I also would like to see is that bug fix and security patch releases don't break current components or change anything in the core of Joomla that isn't strictly necessary (and then still make sure it doesn't break anything else).

But this of course isn't an issue with VM or it's developers, it's with Joomla! and it's developers.

[nicole2292]

I understand your reasons for this but I am VERY disappointed. Mostly with the fact we were led to believe that as soon as Virtuemart 2 was released it would be compatible with Joomla 1.6.

For this reason I have built a whole website for a client on 1.6 in the last month and I have been sitting here just waiting for Virtuemart 2.0 to be ready... I had told them it would be out very soon and thei site could go live just as soon as this happened. Now what do I do? Rebuild the site in Joomla 1.5? Not possible as I am using some of the new features of Joomla 1.6 and I simply don't have the time... using another shopping cart is my only option

FEELING VERY VERY LET DOWN BY THIS NEWS...

[jjk]

Well - you will have to tell your customer to be patient, until VM2 might be declared stable and probably includes J1.6 compability - possibly in approximately two months from now. Generally it is not a good idea to promise a customer a working website based on your assumption that a beta or release candidate is working flawlessly. Usually the opposite is true.

I started producing a J1.6.x/VM2 website too, so I have a similar problem. But fortunately I didn't promise anybody a certain release date...
In the meantime I will continue to add products to a J1.5.23/VM2RC installation. Importing the VM2 data into J1.7/VM2stable later should be easy, as the VM database tables are the same.

If you filled VM2Beta3 with product data already, you will also have to export/import the data manually into VM2RC or VM2stable, because several database tables were added/deleted/changed in the developing process.

[nicole2292]

I was never relying on a beta release to be stable. As I said in my previous post I was waiting for the stable release of VM2 which was supposed to work with J1.6. My understanding from this forum is that even the final stable release will not have J1.6 support as we were originally told it would.

Is that the case? Or is the final stable release still going to have J1.6 support?

[beipink]

I was never relying on a beta release to be stable. As I said in my previous post I was waiting for the stable release of VM2 which was supposed to work with J1.6. My understanding from this forum is that even the final stable release will not have J1.6 support as we were originally told it would.

Is that the case? Or is the final stable release still going to have J1.6 support?

If you read all the posts, it appears that by the time VM.2 Stable is out,  J1.6! will be near the end of is cycle.  The plan for VM2.0 or 2.1 is to support J1.7! which is due to be released on 11/07 (if i remeber correctly)

[franzpeter]

As a shop owner (user), I do not see those big 'advantages' to switch to Joomla 1.6. In the case of VM 2.0 it will run with Joomla 1.5.xxx too as a MVC component. But, all those payment or shipping extensions need a new developement to work with VM 2.0 and above. And those plugins must be stable. Customers do not like shopping carts which are buggy. So a little bit more patience for all those, who express there complaints about, that VM does not actually work with Joomla 1.6 and VM 2.0 may not actually work with Joomla 1.6. Therefore I agree with jenkinhill. There are some other shopping cart solutions, praised as ultimate up to date, which even do not work with UTF 8 tables.