Well after an exceedingly long wait Joomla 1.6 was publicly released back in February. Is it worth moving from Joomla 1.5 up to this release?
To be honest I had awaited this release with great anticipation for more than 2 years but I usually find myself installing Joomla 1.5 (1.5.23 at the moment) instead of Joomla 1.6 most of the time.
Why? Well let’s start with a little background.
Joomla 1.5 was a huge leap from 1.0.15 but there were still a few holdovers and still room for improvement. For those of you who were using the 1.0 series you will remember the horrendous pain involved in migrating websites to the latest version on those occasions when one was forced to upgrade by necessity, client or web host. That’s something I would like to avoid again with the new release especially since the Joomla team did not provide a upgrade facility, thought the JUpgrade component is very very good.
These are the criteria I use when deciding what version of Joomla is to be used
- Do I need the 1.6 ACL model? If yes I will go for 1.6 over 1.5 any day.
- Do I need to use an extension that is Joomla 1.6 compatible only? If yes, then it’s 1.6.
- Do I need to use any extensions that are not ready for 1.6. For more complex website this is generally a YES for me though this will gradually change as more and more of the complex extensions are ported to 1.6.
Another piece of advice. There is no need to upgrade a Joomla 1.5 website to 1.6 unless you really really want to. 1.5 (currently at 1.5.23) is secure, stable and is guaranteed to be supported until April 2012. There would have to be some overriding reason me to put the effort into upgrading a current website to this version. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”.