Magnolia 6: Our New Approach to Product Releases

With Magnolia CMS 6, we're changing our product release and maintenance approach for the better. The new approach will allow us to innovate faster while keeping the same control over the stability of the platform. Here's what you need to know:

From version 6 onwards, Magnolia classifies major releases (x.y) into Long-Term Support (LTS) and Feature releases.

We're keeping our same versioning scheme and will classify major releases under Long-Term Support (LTS) if they meet our requirements. We will maintain LTS releases for at least two years from their availability date and we will make sure to have at least two LTS releases maintained at the same time. Along with this, we'll guarantee a smooth upgrade to LTS releases from a previous Feature release or LTS release.

The LTS releases will focus on API stability and backwards compatibility, and we'll only declare a version as LTS if it meets strict criteria. The APIs must be backward compatible, including deprecated features. Deprecated code will be kept for at least two major versions to ensure you have enough time to make any code changes necessary before any features are fully phased out.

The new approach will allow us to release more often with Feature releases, so our latest and most innovative features will move to production faster. We will maintain these releases until the next release is available - whether it’s LTS or Feature.

While these releases are more frequent, they're still up to our production ready standards. Any customers wanting the functionality in a new Feature release, therefore, can safely upgrade. We won't compromise on security no matter the version and will provide security patches whenever necessary.

More details on our End-of-life policy are available here.

We strongly believe that these changes will lead to greater innovation through Feature releases and more clarity through declaring LTS releases of the CMS platform. Magnolia customers will get the features they want faster.

The great news is, these changes will not affect the previous releases, so you can expect all the benefits going forward, with none of the inconveniences often associated with such changes.

Find more information about the Magnolia CMS 6.1 release here.