Joomla 1.7 (stable) is out. The new relese policy of the CMS will release a new version every six months, with a LTS release avery three. That means it will be hard to stay up to date if the new release will not support previous releases plugins and templates - at least starting from 1.6, or 1.7.
It should be easier now to perform an update, but that will be true only for thoose using the CMS as is, no plugins or extensions. Otherwise, probabily, it will be a nightmare - a six month cycling nightmare, that will happen to the 95% of Joomla users (who never installed a plugin or extension in his Jomla driven site?).
We'll see...
Update 20/07/2011 07:46
As stated above, after updating from 1.6.5 to 1.7, my site stopped working. No issues on the administration part, but the public side just displayed a blank page.
After Googling around, I found it is a issue of T3 Framework I use (an extension...), due to the use of:
$query = new JDatabaseQuery;
instead of:
$query = $db->getQuery(true);
As you can see here, there are a few compatibility issues to care about if you developed a Joomla 1.6 plugin or extension.
Also, TinyMCE Editor (Joomla 1.7 native... and part of Joomla 1.7 distribution) has some issue - when editing a link, no way to use the select input to insert "_blank" or else... they're simply not populated. Do it from HTML view... and wait for a fix.
I wonder to know what else is not working... Jooid extension? Running a grep on the joomla directory procued this:
grep "new JDatabaseQuery;" ./joomla/* -r
./joomla/jaextmanager_data/j16/plugin/system/jat3/versions/1.2.7/jat3/core/joomla/modulehelper.php: $query = new JDatabaseQuery;
./joomla/jaextmanager_data/j16/plugin/system/jat3/versions/1.2.7/jat3/core/menu/base.class.php: $query = new JDatabaseQuery;
./joomla/plugins/system/jat3/jat3/core/joomla/modulehelper.php: $query = new JDatabaseQuery;
./joomla/plugins/system/jat3/jat3/core/menu/base.class.php: $query = new JDatabaseQuery;
Not bad, isn't it? Just two lines to be edited... I wonder how many people using Joomla can do-it-yourself, and how many will bother on forums whining for a solution.