Joomlatools logo

Joomla! 1.0 end of life

28 September 2008

At the beginning of the year I predicted that Joomla! would reach it’s turning point in March 2008 based on the download statistics of joomlacode.org.

My prediction turned out to be correct, however it looked like Joomla! 1.0 wasn’t going to give up the fight easily. I concluded that the further uptake for 1.5 would depend on an increase in native and stable extensions and an announcement about the end of life of Joomla! 1.0.

Over the last months the number of new native extensions has been growing rapidly, for August the extensions directory team reported that about 75% of new extensions where native Joomla! 1.5 extensions. A quick search on the extension directory shows that 30% of all component are now Joomla! 1.5 native.

People are also slowly making the switch from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5 only, a good example are the guys over at Yootheme. A while ago they announced they where switching their templates completely to Joomla! 1.5 a few weeks ago they also released ‘teamlog’ a 1.5 native project management extension and from what I have heard there are more extensions on the way.

Let’s have a look at the downloads for the last months and see if we can make any new predictions.

The below graph is showing the monthly download statistics for both Joomla! 1.0 and 1.5.

Conclusions :

  • Joomla! 1.5 is seeing a large increase in downloads since May 2008, while downloads for 1.0 are decreasing rapidly.
  • Total amount of downloads are holding steady at 400k downloads a month.

What does this tell s about the uptake of Joomla! 1.5 ? For that we need to have a look at the following graph.

Conclusions :

  • The graph shows a steady 10% increase of 1.5 downloads in regards to 1.0 since June 2008.
  • The graph show the percentage share for both technologies is now at 88% for 1.5 and 12% for 1.0.

Based on this data I predict that Joomla! 1.0 will be reaching the end of it’s life around the beginning of 2009. Time for the project to bite the bullet and set a date : 03/06/09, or March 6, 2009, 3 years and 6 months after the release of 1.0 seems like the perfect date to me. What do you think ?

  • http://www.alfystudio.com Ahmad Alfy

    agreed
    but some extensions where dropped by the developers without migration scripts or even 1.5 versions.
    I know a friend how wants to migrate to J1.5 but his website use extensions everywhere and he’s stuck!

    I had the same thing before with the comments system but I did I fixed it manually.

    I believe people should stop developing for 1.0 and start paying attention to 1.5!

  • alim

    sooner the better, dev on a dual version track splits too many resources, 1.0 was flawed with so many security holes

  • http://www.hummerbie.com hummerbie

    Based on your statistics I guess you are right, Joomla 1.0 is at the end of its livecycle.
    However there will still be a lot of installed 1.0.x websites that are not going to be converted to 1.5

    Conversion is not that easy and if you are depending on components that stay on the Joomla 1.0. platform you are not moving to 1.5.x

    Yet the date you set has some nice figures around it :-) so yes, it is a good date to end the 1.0.x version and don’t upgrade anymore (well maybe if there is a mayor security hole found?)

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    I agree with you that there are still a lot of Joomla! 1.0 sites out there. One way to make it clear that the time to upgrade has come is to set the a date on the end of live of 1.0.

    I don’t consider the conversion problem that big of a deal. After all the extensions are (or should be) open source, one big benefit of that is that you can make them compatible with 1.5 yourself. As a matter of fact we have done this for clients in the past already.

    End of life would really mean stop any official support of it. This also means no security updates anymore. At the moment Joomla! 1.0 is already in security mode.

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes
  • Cheryl

    I’ve taken the plunge and started to use 1.5 for new sites, when will docman have a 1.5 native version? I love docman and want to use it!

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    Hi Cheryl,
    don’t worry about using docman 1.4 in joomla 1.5+legacy. It’s going to work faster and more secure than most native extensions.
    Please see
    http://blog.joomlatools.org/2007/12/joomla-15rc4-memory-usage-and-legacy.html
    http://blog.joomlatools.org/2008/07/common-joomla-misconceptions.html

  • frazier345

    Hello, first are your statistics of full packages or include upgrades? The reason I ask is that there has not been an upgrade to 1.0 since Feb. where 1.5 has had many upgrades in the past 6 months. So if you are going to build a new site and you downloaded 1.0.15 in Feb. You already have the latest version you don’t need to go to joomla.org to download it again. Where 1.5 is now at 1.5.7. So if you downloaded it in March you would most likely download the full package again in September for a new site vs. using 1.5.1 and applying upgrades to it.

    Also its the old argument, why upgrade if its working fine? Why move to 1.5 when 1.0 is working just fine for me and my users? Why move to Vista if XP is working just fine for me and my users.

    As for components, there are some commercial components that are not moving to 1.5 for a while. mosDirectory is one. Until there is a upgrade or very similar product with a very similar user interface, that site will stay at 1.0.15.

    Now new sites for me will be built on 1.5, but why move old sites? Also another question is will my clients pay me to convert their perfectly working site to 1.5? Until I can give them a very good reason why, they will stay at 1.0.

  • http://johan.janssens.me Johan Janssens

    The statistics include both full downloads and upgrades. You are indeed correct that the figures are a bit tainted by the fact that 1.0 hasn’t received any updates. You are also correct in pointing out that there are still alot of sites running 1.0 installs and that is fine.

    The goal of my post was not to convince people to all upgrade their 1.0 sites, the goal was to set a clear date that the Joomla! project would move on. After that it will likely still take some time for 1.0 to be wipped out of existence. This is a bit the same what is happening with PHP 4 at the moment which also reached it’s end of life.

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes
  • http://www.wolke23.de Frank

    I want to upgrade from 1.0.x to 1.5 with many Joomla-Sites. But it’s not possible. Look at http://www.meinhosting.de/content-management-systeme/migration-von-joomla-10-zu-joomla-15-test-1-28.html (german blog)

  • http://www.digiflex.no Alek

    Very nice prediction. People are stil making 1.0 native extensions tho so i hope they will end the life of 1.0 soon so that we can get all developers to focus on 1.5 native extensions :)

  • marcella

    i’m terrified about migration from 1.0 to 1.5 I hope it will be good for a long time!

  • marcella

    i’m terrified about migration from 1.0 to 1.5 I hope it will be good for a long time!

  • http://www.odesk.com Daryl James

    If you’re interested, we’ve got some Joomla trends from the freelance side (http://www.odesk.com/trends/joomla)?

© 2006 - 2013 Joomlatools - Joomla! is a registered trademark of Open Source Matters, Inc.