With the announcement of the forthcoming 3.3 release of the Joomla! CMS, the Production Leadership Team would like to define our plans and timeline for this release.

Timeline

The PLT is pleased to announce that the 3.3 release will be made available on April 1, 2014. We have defined several milestones leading up to this release date, to include:

  • February 24, 2014 - Feature proposals must be submitted
  • March 8, 2014 - All features must be merged
  • March 12, 2014 - 3.3 Beta Release
  • March 26, 2014 - 3.3 Release Candidate
  • April 1, 2014 - 3.3 Stable Release

Please note that dates may be subject to change depending on availability of volunteers and circumstances beyond our control.

Vision for 3.3

For 3.3, we aim for a smaller release focusing on the backlog of feature proposals. Some of the items we would like to focus on and ask for help with testing and review are:

  • MooTools to jQuery JavaScript conversions
  • Cloud Storage APIs
  • Microdata library implementation
  • Front end module editing

Though our focus is on our feature backlog, we will still be accepting new feature proposals. For 3.3, this could mean optimizing an area of the code base or refactoring a class to improve its performance and testability.

Extended Security Support for 3.2

The PLT is planning a 3.2 release on April 1, 2014, the same day as 3.3.0. For this release, the PLT plans to include all of the bug fixes committed after 3.2.2 into this release, enabling 3.2 users to have the most stable code base we can offer them during the extended support period.

As previously announced, 3.2 will receive extended security support through October 2014 for users on hosts who do not meet the minimum required PHP version of 5.3.10. During the extended support period users can expect:

  • Security releases for 3.2 as needed
  • Continued support for 2.5
  • Continued support for 3.3

Users who are unable to update to 3.3 due to the new PHP requirements are able to use the one click-click update, once they update to PHP 5.3.10.

Discussion

For discussion about the 3.3 release, please utilize the CMS Google Group mailing list.