Today, we’d like to update our Community on new changes to the versioning of Oro products. This is the result of our platform upgrading to a newer version of Symfony, the high-performance PHP framework our platform is built on.
How the Product Versioning Will Change
You may have noticed that OroCommerce is one digit ‘younger’ than the rest of our products. While the most recent long-term support (LTS) release of OroCRM is 2.6, OroCommerce’s freshest version is 1.6.
The time has come for more consistent versioning across all of our products. As we upgraded all the Oro applications to Symfony 3.4, we’ll update our own version numbering scheme accordingly. This means we’ll jump from versions 2.x to 3.x for all future OroPlatform and OroCRM releases. OroCommerce versions will go from 1.x straight to 3.x. For simplicity, the versioning of all our products will be the same moving forward. Upcoming minor releases scheduled for March (which would have been versioned as 2.7 and 1.7) will come out as 3.0 BETA. 3.0 RC (release candidate) versions will be released in May 2018 (which was previously titled version 2.8 and 1.8). The LTS versions of OroPlatform, OroCRM, and OroCommerce 3.0 will be launched in July 2018.
Why Upgrading to Symfony 3.4 is So Important?
The reasons to upgrade from Symfony 2.8 to Symfony 3.4 are numerous. But the essential reasons are:
- Discontinued support of Symfony 2.8: this version will be maintained until November 2018. This means no security patches or performance improvements will officially be provided after that date.
- Better compatibility with applications that utilize the most recent Symfony versions.
- Symfony 3.x is designed to be backward-compatible with version 4.x, which provides comfort and scale to future product development once support for Symfony 3.4 is discontinued.
Symfony is the flexible and extendable framework all Oro products are built on. As we continue to improve our products, we wanted to take full advantage of all the enhancements introduced in the Symfony’s 3.x versions.
What About the Release and Maintenance Schedule?
The new product versioning scheme will not affect the way we release and maintain product versions. Regular major or minor maintenance releases will still be issued every 2 months and maintained during the next two release cycles, which is 4 months. LTS product versions will be out every 6 months and will be maintained for the next 18 months with security fixes being released for another 18 months. As mentioned earlier, major releases will be reserved for significant architecture and technology changes, including framework upgrades. Minor releases will introduce new features and enhancements. Patch (maintenance) releases will only introduce bug fixes and small refinements. Please mind that the upcoming 3.0 BETA and RC versions will not be supported as our regular stable and LTS releases, meaning that no fixes will be developed for these versions. However, the LTS 3.0 releases will be supported and maintained according to our usual release and maintenance schedule.
We hope you find the new product versioning more convenient and user-friendly. If you have any further questions about the release schedule or product versioning, just drop us a line.
