The new version of Joomla is coming along its third Beta was released this week. Within the new version of Joomla you will see some of the suggestions the JoomFish team set out in a white paper 2 years ago. The idea of the white paper was to improve the overall tagging and filtering of content within the Joomla database based on their language. The development team working on Joomla 1.6 interpreted the white paper in some aspects differently than the intention we had however the overall goal to improve in the language management of Joomla itself is achieved quite well.

The primary change moves the language relationship (parameter in articles) into its own field for all of the primary tables of the Joomla database. This change will allow everybody to create a simple website with different language depended articles based on the Joomla core only. The primary feature of JoomFish - the management of translations and the dependency between an original and its translation - will not be implemented in the Joomla 1.6 version.

This is an exciting development for the JoomFish extension as we can now focus on a more optimized integration and storage of language dependant versions while keeping our focus on the management process itself. With the positive and encouraging new development process of the Joomla core we decided to postpone our next 2.1 release for a few weeks to implement some changes which focus on a smooth transition process to the new Joomla 1.6 core. This means that you will see in the next version of JoomFish some changes which are dedicated to simplify your upgrade path from Joomla 1.5 + JoomFish 2.1 to Joomla 1.6 # JoomFish 2.x.

The development of a Joomla 1.6 compatible version of JoomFish started already with the conceptual phase. During the event J and Beyond we discussed necessary steps for the integration of CCK extensions and also our plan for releases related the next generation of Joomla. These discussions lay down a clear roadmap for JoomFish 2.1 to be prepared for Joomla 1.6 but not yet compatible with it.

Our commitment is that the upgrade from JoomFish 2.1 to the next generation JoomFish that is compatible with Joomla 1.6 will be smooth. And the 1.6 compatible version of JoomFish will be released soon after the final release of Joomla. Of course pre-releases will be available for all our club members.