Since years we have a well defined release strategy. Every fourth Thursday in month a patch release and in May and November a new feature release is shipped. As DPMedia landed in our portfolio, we tried something new. This change will now be expanded on all of our extensions.
As Joomla is more and more used by professionals, extension developers must provide modern release processes as well. That's why we have since years a process of timed releases instead of "it is ready when ready". By the way, Joomla is using this strategy since version 4 as well. This means that our users and customers know exactly when new versions of our extensions are shipped and can plan their work accordingly. Our strategy is, that we publish every fourth Thursday in month a release. In May and November we ship a new feature release and on every other month a patch release with bugfixes.
This worked now properly for some years. As we offered DPMedia to the public, many feature requests came in very quickly. So we didn't want to wait for another half year till we can ship them. That's why we adapted that process for DPMedia. If there was a new feature done for the next release date, then we published a new feature release, even when it would be a patch release. This resulted in four subsequent feature releases at the beginning in four months. The advantage was that the new versions have been much smaller than half year new feature releases, the risk of a bug thereby got reduced as well.
As it became very convenient, to have faster feature releases, we expanded the strategy in recent months to DPCases and DPAttachments as well with great success. It allowed us to deliver much faster some pure Joomla 4 packages.
As we realized that this strategy has many advantages, we are now extending it to all extensions. This means that on the 23. of June 2022 a new feature release of DPCalendar will be shipped instead of a patch release, as we did some paid features for a customer we want to ship for all of our users.
Kind regards
Allon Moritz aka laoneo
Founder of Digital Peak