During the just-concluded Production Leadership Team (PLT) meeting in San Jose, we discussed the goals for the upcoming release in January 2012. This will be the first long-term support (LTS) release since version 1.5.

First, some quick background. In December 2009, the PLT decided to change to a time-based release cycle where we release a new short-term support release (STS) every 6 months and a new LTS release every 18 months. Versions 1.6 and 1.7 were the first STS releases under the new development cycle, and the upcoming January 2012 release will be the first LTS release under the new cycle.

In November 2010, we published a vision document called Rediscover Content (www.joomla.org/announcements/general-news/5321-rediscover-content-the-vision-for-next-years-release.html). As we have gained more experience with the new release strategy, it has become clear that these longer-term goals should apply only to the LTS releases, where we have time to work on larger, more ambitious goals. Accordingly, we have decided to keep this vision as the overall goal for the July 2013 LTS release. We plan to publish more details about these goals later this year.

In the meantime, we compiled a number of smaller goals for the January 2012 release. To be clear, these are not guaranteed to be in this release. This will depend on people from the community. However, we think it is realistic to aim to have some or all of these features ready in time for the next release.

• Module to automatically notify users when an update is available
• Improve the update process to support updating of LTS and STS versions
• Component to make it easier to create and maintain update sites
• Implement Open Search in the search component
• Possible performance enhancements
• New search engine in Joomla core
• Implement image manipulation in media manager based on new platform features
• Fix lots of bugs!