With Joomla 4.0 beta being released a few weeks ago, we enter into a phase of stabilization. Joomla! 4.0 is feature complete, that means, no new features are going to be added to Joomla 4.0. The focus is on fixing the last bugs to get Joomla! 4.0 out as soon as possible.
But what will happen until the release and afterwards? Obviously we don’t want to stop new feature development, which is why we would like to refine our development strategy for upcoming versions. Whenever we start the work on a new minor version, we plan to define the subsequent two minor releases This results in a more reliable release cycle and a more consistent road map.
Development strategy
In general, our development strategy stays the same. As we have strived for in the past, we want to release a new minor version every 6 months. For example, 4.1 should then be released 6 months after 4.0 and Joomla 4.2 another 6 months after. This however results in timing issues, Realistically, a new feature would have to be ready and merged 3 months before the actual release in order to iron out all bugs and test it properly.
What does that mean? If we start the development of new features after the latest minor version has been released, we have less than 3 months left to finish everything. That is in most cases not enough to implement bigger functionality. So the plan is to have a jump start and define the base features for the next two releases while the current development version is in beta state. Concurrently we also plan to start the development process of aforementioned features.
More specifically, we’re going to develop more than one minor release at a time. In fact we have started development on Joomla! 4.1 already. That gives us a little bit more time to work on bigger features for a minor release.
