Popular open source content management system Joomla announced version 1.7 on July 19. Updates in its latest release include security, productivity and architecture updates, but the organization is also restructuring Joomla versioning.

Joomla 1.7 is the first release under Joomla's new 6-month release schedule and improvement decisions were crowd sourced from nearly 500,000 forum members and data collected from Joomla extensions.

Going forward, Joomla releases can be expected in January and July; and every third release will be a long-term release that is supported for 18 months with the help of occasional patch releases. The latest release, however, is not an LTR and will only be supported for 7 months.

"We've got two different user preferences: A lot of users want to have access to the latest stuff as soon as it's ready. On the other hand, we have a lot of very large sites running Joomla, and that community expressed concern that they didn't want to go through an update cycle every six months," Mark Dexter, a Joomla development coordinator, told IDG News Service.

"If someone wants long-term releases, they will only have to upgrade every 18 months. If someone wants the latest and greatest, they can stay up with the six-month releases," he added.

But in a Joomla blog post, Jen Kramer, a Joomla template and configuration expert for highly customized Joomla sites, made the case for updating to the latest version, despite it not being an LTR. The primary reason to upgrade, explains Kramer, is that Joomla 1.6 will reach the end of its life in August 2011--meaning, after August, that version will have no further security updates.

Joomla has also made a concerted effort to make the upgrading process easier. The new version can be downloaded with one click, whereas previous version updates required replacing multiple files, notes IDG.

Joomla 1.7 features several bug fixes and new features, such as improved search, automatic security screening of form data, new language packs and architectural decoupling.

The architectural change is especially notable. By segmenting PHP Joomla libraries out from the core, Joomla has created something called "Joomla Platform," which has applications outside of Joomla.

For more:
- see the Joomla press release
- see the IDG news article via ITNews 

Related Articles:
Microsoft WebMatrix released; utility for users unclear 
New report attempts to measure open source CMS popularity 
Happy fifth birthday, Joomla
Alfresco joins forces with Joomla! on CMIS project