Winter of Joomla Discontent Continues

Yes, more bad news about Joomla (the software that powers the news portion of PhoneNews.com, important software). We just did a dry-run with Joomla 1.5’s first release candidate. We’re not happy. Just a quick review, Joomla has slapped developers in the face, attempting to end development of closed-source add-ons and software for Joomla. We find that decision to have no legal basis, and are ignoring it completely. In case you haven’t noticed, we have far too thick a legal skin to care what Joomla’s developers have to say about the law.

However, Joomla is now dropping the ball code-wise. It took us considerable pleading just to convince them that they had to support the old RSS links with their new RSS system. Essentially, if I hadn’t interveined, Joomla was prepared to make everyone reading every Joomla site on the planet… resubscribe to a new feed URL. Now, we learned long ago that developers don’t always make the brightest RSS decisions, and partnered with FeedBurner to have independent RSS delivery. And, Google agreed with our line of thought, buying the company out.

But, now things are getting bad with Joomla. Version 1.5 uses a new SEO system, essentially making URLs better for search engines. We think that’s very important. However, the structure they are using breaks all old links on PhoneNews.com. That’s right… any link you’ve made to any news article, as of right now, will be broken when we upgrade to Joomla 1.5. Not hot.

Thankfully, this is a release candidate, and there is still time for Joomla to fix this. However, I doubt they will. Re-writing the entire URL-generation system at this point would significantly delay Joomla… and they appear to be sick of delays (we’re coming up on two years since when this version was supposed to be out).

This puts us in a difficult position. We’ve been hammered in the search engine ranks for not having web-friendly URLs. Now, Joomla adds those, but forgets to add a legacy mode. So, we’re now stuck with a darned if we do, darned if we don’t decision. Search engines will penalize us for killing all our old links… big time. But, if we don’t upgrade to Joomla 1.5, we’ll wind up continuing to lose in the rankings by not staying competitive.

Joomla, please get your act together. You’re about to cause another fork in your project. Unlike Mambo vs Joomla, this split is going to potentially kill your project. Everything on a Joomla 1.0 web site, from a reader perspective, must work when upgrading to Joomla 1.5 (and please, stop calling it a “migration”… it’s just confusing). Get your act together, or you’re going to cause folks to say “why the heck should I bust my rump putting in Joomla 1.5, when I can deploy something else like WordPress that doesn’t screw stuff up with every major release”.

That’s something we’re asking ourselves too, right now.