Joomla 1.7 Development Underway, Release Coming July 10

Mozilla is not the only one moving to a faster release cycle, the advantages of having fixed release dates and new versions coming out regularly and frequently haven't been lost on the Joomla community.

The popular content management system (CMS) is moving a six-month development schedule starting with the upcoming Joomla 1.7.

The project is also splitting the nuts and bolts of the software into the Joomla Platform on which the actual CMS will be built, but which will be available for use independently as well.

"We have just switched to a time-based release cycle. So version 1.7 will be our first version that is released at a specific point in time – July 10, 2011 – instead of when a given set of features is complete," Mark Dexter from the Joomla Leadership team wrote.

"So we know when version 1.7 will release, but we don't know what new features it will contain. Because this is our first cycle of this type, we will be figuring some stuff out as we go along," he explained.

This is not to say that new features aren't coming in Joomla 1.7, but they will be included only if they are stable enough in time for the release date, which, at this point, is regarded as more important than any new feature.

Since this is a transition period, everything won't go smoothly no matter how much the developers will prepare, and the schedule comes first. You can check out a planned time line for Joomla 1.7 development in the blog post above.

"A second wrinkle is that, on or about 30 April 2011, we will split off the Joomla Platform (the libraries folder more or less) as a separate project," Dexter also said.

"This will change the way in which we fix bugs and add features that affect the platform. Again, this is all new, so again we will be learning as we go along," he added.