Question

I know Joomla 1.6 is now released, but curious if there will be an issue creating a website this early after the release. I am finding only a small number of available 1.6 templates. As I understand now, 1.5 components, extensions, etc. are not compatible and need to be upgraded. Am I going to run into a problem of not having a good selection of addons?

Should I use 1.5 now and wait til better support is available before moving to 1.6?

Answer 1

It really depends on what you are trying to do. The number of 1.6 ready extensions is growing quickly, there are over 400 of them now in just 3 weeks. Every big dev that I know if is working on updates for the most popular extensions.

If you do not have any special needs, then 1.6 is a very good product. I think it is much more polished than 1.5 was at release. There was a ton more beta testing and a much better foundation of code to work on this time.

I don’t think you will see much 1.6 being used by pros just yet, because it is an unknown – there could be major problems that pop up once it gets hammered a little harder on live sites. There are also some extensions missing that will stop quite a few people – k2 being one of the notables.

This question is something we’ve thought over a lot as we’ve got several sites in the build/planning stages right now that will need to be upgraded within 18 months if they are built on 1.5. However, we’ve opted to wait a little while longer until there is a better picture of how solid this code is and when 1.7 will be released. It is entirely possible that any sites built in the next 2-3 months will skip 1.6 and go right to 1.7 when it comes time to upgrade.

The upgrade process is looking pretty promising so it is very possible that it will be a relatively painless process to upgrade a couple months from now.

I vote stay with 1.5 unless you really need the ACL.