CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Joomla 1.6 is now out and CiviCRM now have a project underway to provide a version which will run under it and make use of the new ACL features.

All great news, but for those of us currently on Joomla 1.5 we need to plan our upgrade paths to maintain a fully functional site at all times.

Will upcoming releases of CiviCRM continue to function under 1.5 and if so, how long will this support last?

The upgrade path from 1.5 to 1.6 for existing Joomla sites is not stable at the moment.  There are third party tools in development and a future Joomla release may have an upgrade path from 1.5 built in, but there is no easy route at present.

I'd be interested to hear the thoughts from the Civi development community so I can plan ahead.

Thanks Lobo, i appreciate the detailed response.

Reading the Joomla forums this evening the next long term supported release will be 1.8 which won't be released until January 2012!  I'm not sure I can risk the uncertainty of upgrading to 1.6 which will be out of support this August meaning vulnerabilities won't be patched etc beyond then.

The killer apps on my site are CiviCRM (obviously  )  and Virtuemart, and I don't want to end up with a combination of CMS and apps where I need to upgrade one for security but can't because of incompatibility.   Joomla are obviously going through some pain at the moment restructuring their release cycles but it is causing a lot of uncertainty.

I can see that it doesn't make sense to keep J1.5 support into CiviCRM 4, but it would be re-assuring if the roadmap for CiviCRM could include J1.5 support in 3.4 until at least a few months after the release of J1.8, even if this is limited to critical bug fixes and vulnerability patches only in 3.4.   Would that approach be possible without MIH or would MIH still be required?

After waiting eagerly so long for J1.6 the uncertainty of the Joomla development cycle and the lack of upgrade path from 1.5 is leaving me slightly deflated.  At this rate I may yet bite the bullet and go through the pain barrier and steep learning curve of switching to Drupal.

Understood.

My final question on this, I promise.  Assuming no funding, when will support (bug fixes etc) for 3.4 end?
From the blog it looks like it is just a single release with 4.0 following quickly afterwards, but correct me if I'm wrong.

Many thanks for your help with this and for a great product.  We will be sticking with CiviCRM regardless of which CMS platform / version we end up on.