Something that’s been on my mind for a while is how to manage Joomla versions.
Imagine, if you would, Club Commerce at full membership, whose Members contributed a quarter million dollars in direct software development, and confronting the release of Joomla 3.0.
What if Joomla 3.0 makes much of that quarter-mill investment in Joomla 2.5 development obsolete? Or partially obsolete?
How do we manage these Joomla versions to protect our investment?
This question came to mind reading the Nicholas’ reply to a “Future of FoF” ticket (this quote is an excertp):
Right now the biggest challenge is Joomla!’s MVC future. Since Joomla! 3.0 the JModel / JController / JView names are used by Interfaces and the new MVC structure which has nothing to do with the old one and pretty much screws all fools who did things the Joomla! Way. The old structure is retained in the Legacy classes, e.g. JModelLegacy. Despite no plan actually existing, I suspect that the Legacy classes will be dropped. When that happens I will include them inside FOF. If the other Joomla! Platform classes FOF depends on are re-fuck-tored too, I will provide my own alternatives. In other words I am going to grow FOF as the Joomla! features it depends on are spirited away between Joomla! releases. This will asymptotically lead to a new framework but, as I said, backwards compatibility is king. The only real reason for me to break it is a new PHP version making it impossible to keep it.
FoF (FOF?!) reduces code required to write components; and, helps today’s components work in tomorrow’s Joomla. Very interesting, and a welcome solution to an emerging pressure.
We’ll have to talk about this within my Club, as it grows.
