Let's suppose you're starting to design a new website and you have choosen joomla as your CMS. Then you'll probably ask yourself which version of joomla you should take: 1.0 or 1.5. This is an important question, but at this moment there is no easy answer on this. This article is about some things you should keep in mind before you make your descision.

There are a lot of differences between the two releases. Joomla 1.0 is in fact a re-branded release of Mambo. From the start of joomla, it was the intention to make a new release with a completely rewritten code base and that would be called Joomla 1.5. It had to become better in usability, scalability, flexibility, ... . The current release of joomla 1.5 is RC2 and it looks very promisiing. It would lead me to far to explain every difference between the two releases, but I'm quit sure that everyone who is already familiar with joomla will like the 1.5 release.

So why would you not choose for the 1.5 release? First thing you have to keep in mind is that it is still a release candidate. This means that it is not yet fully stable and if you have bad luck, you will run into problems. This also means that you might build a complete website which is fully functional now, but there is no guarantee that it will also be functional with the first stable release. If don't want to deal with these kind of problems, then 1.0 might be a better solution for you.

A second drawback of choosing the 1.5 release is the compatibility of third party extensions and templates. Joomla 1.5 contains a legacy plugin. If you enable this, it should make most third party extensions and templates compatible with 1.5. But in reality you will notice that a lot of extensions are not fully working as they should (the forum on this site is a good example of this) or simply won't even install in the new release. It even gets worse as some of the commercial third party extensions don't plan to make a 1.5 version, as purely commercial extensions are not allowed any more. If you plan to use certain extensions, then you should first check if they are compatible with 1.5 before you decide which version of joomla to use.

Finally, you also have to keep in mind that this release is new and as a consequence, the user base is still a lot smaller then the joomla 1.0 user base. Although there is already good support for 1.5 on the joomla forum, there is still a lack of good documentation and tutorials. This together with previous drawbacks can make it quit difficult for webmasters without to much technical skills to start with joomla 1.5.

If you think now you should choose joomla 1.0, then I have a few thoughts to make you doubt again. Although a lot of extensions are not yet compatible with 1.5, most of them will be in the future. But what about new extensions? There are already some new extensions which are for joomla 1.5 only and a lot more will come. These are not (and never will be) compatible with 1.0. Also the argument about the smaller user base and lack of documentation will be become less and less true as more peope will start using 1.5 and the documentation team is working hard on joomla 1.5. Although support for 1.0 will continue for quit some time, it will fade out in the end. This all means that you'll problably want to switch to joomla 1.5 some day. As explained in my previous article, there is no easy upgrade path from 1.0 to 1.5. It is possible to migrate from 1.0 to 1.5, but don't count on it that this will go very smoothly.

Conclusion

I think the question: 'should I choose joomla 1.0 or 1.5?' should be asked a bit differently. Ask yourself this question 'Do I want to start with joomla 1.5 now and spend some extra work to deal with the problems this still might give, or do I want to spend that extra work in the future to migrate an already running 1.0 website?'. This question seems a lot easier doesn't it? I would always advice to try joomla 1.5. If you have to many problems, then you can always switch back to 1.0.