Today, Joomla just released the new long-term maintenance release, Joomla 2.5.0. Interesting to see how fast Joomla release the new versions. For all our VirtueMart 1.1 customers, you won't be able to migrate (not upgrade) your Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 because your VirtueMart 1.1 will NOT run on Joomla 2.5. The only possible way is if you also upgrade your VirtueMart to 2.0, but this will need extra hard works because many things will need to be migrated. And you may want to consult Joomla forum and VirtueMart forum first a lot before doing the migration.

In the meantime, for all our VirtueMart 2.0 customers, your Joomla 1.7 can be easily upgraded to Joomla 2.5. Stay tune with us, because in the next 1-2 weeks, we will release another VirtueMart 2.0 template that is compatible with Joomla 2.5 and has new features such as Horizontal/Vertical Product Carousel and Product Detail Page in tab format on top of the current cool features.

Finally, the long-waited VirtueMart 2.0 has been released. This is a great step moving forward for VirtueMart community. Although currently most of us are still unsure about the stability of the codes, but at least with the release of this stable version, more and more people will use and test it so the extension can be mature soon enough.

We strongly suggest for all VM fans to start learning the new VM 2.0 since this will be your future. We do not recommend to use it for live stores since you don't know yet what will happen if something goes wrong. Give it some time until more and more VM extensions are compatible with VM 2.0 including our templates, and more issues are solved through their forum. Congratulations to VM Team.

In the meantime you can download the VirtueMart 2.0 from VirtueMart site at http://dev.virtuemart.net/attachments/download/370/com_virtuemart.2.0.0_extract_first.zip

Good news for all VirtueMart fans. Yesterday VirtueMart just released the Release Candidate 3 for VirtueMart 2.0. They even promise to release the final version on Dec 19, 2011. Well, finally it arrives. We strongly suggest for all VM fans to start learning the new VM 2.0 since this will be your future. We do not recommend to use it for live stores since you don't know yet what will happen if something goes wrong. Give it some time until more and more VM extensions are compatible with VM 2.0 including our templates, and more issues are solved through their forum. Congratulations to VM Team.

In the meantime you can download the VirtueMart 2.0 RC3 from VirtueMart site at http://dev.virtuemart.net/attachments/download/369/com_virtuemart2.0.0_RC3_extract_first.zip

Joomla will release the next version, Joomla 2.5. Instead of releasing Joomla 2.0, Joomla directly jumps into 2.5. Although the reasons behind this release are quite reasonable, but for many people this release will be very weird. Why there is no Joomla 2.0? What happen with Joomla 2.0? That will be the first thought for almost every Joomla fans all over the world.

Usually, in every software development cycle, version 2.0 will mean there are major improvements or major changes to that cycle. This is what most people will think at the first time, just like Windows 7 or Windows 8 or PHP 4 or PHP 5 or HTML 4 or HTML 5, etc. However, Joomla has decided to apply its own policy regarding its version convention. Every .5 version will mean the cycle will have a Long Term Release or Long Term Support.

So, if Joomla release version 2.5 or 3.5 or 4.5, etc, it means that development cycle will be supported for a long term period of time, just like version 1.5. All other versions except .5 will mean the cycle will have a Short Term Support just like version 1.6 and 1.7.

So, what do you think? Do you agree with Joomla Team decision with the version convention or do you think it will only make many people confused? Share your thoughts here.