3.1.2, 3.1.3, 3.1.4 What is going on?

The numbering of the CMS version 3 releases that are coming in the next day or so is going to be a bit surprising. Maybe not as strange as going from 1.7 to 2.5, but let’s take a closer look so everyone understands what is going on.

As previously posted, the plan was for a release of 3.1.2 early this week.  However some people automatically updated prior to the release due to receiving premature notification of the release while final testing of the release packages by the Joomla! Bug Squad was beginning.

When they updated they found that, in fact, there was a problem with the packages.  That problem caused their updates to fail, breaking their sites.  After several intense days of investigation, it was determined that the failure was due to changes to a key file (restore.php) in the update component itself.  This caused the updates to fail before completing.

Once the cause of the problem was identified, a solution was sought.  Although it seems as though a limited number of sites were impacted by this change, it is important to provide them with a way to update successfully using the automatic updater, which the corrupted file would prevent.

After a lot of head scratching, experimentation and testing a workable plan was developed.  That is where the strange release schedule and numbers come in.

3.1.2, the release that was never released, will not have a formal release.

3.1.3 will be a release that will only replace the corrupted file.  Only users who installed 3.1.2 will install 3.1.3. Everyone else will skip 3.1.2 and 3.1.3 and go straight to 3.1.4.

• Users currently on 3.1.1 will go directly to 3.1.4.
• Users who accidentally went to 3.1.2 will go to 3.1.3 and then 3.1.4.

All of this will work seamlessly in the Joomla update component.

Thanks as always to the people who test the pre-release CMS packages and to those who accidentally updated and quickly reported problems.  This participation means that no broken version of the CMS was released and is what makes Joomla! not just such a powerful application but also a great development and user community to be a part of.

Though 3.141592 has been suggested as the next release, most likely we’ll have a 3.1.5 in August just  before the beta of 3.2.

Update: Added missing paragraph and missing dots in title.