During conversations with clients over the last few months, one key question keeps coming up: "should I use Joomla 1.0 or Joomla 1.5? [1]" In fact, I can trace the first time I was asked that question back to October 2006.

Now that 1.5 has officially launched, I tend to point the non-technically minded to 1.0 and those who don't mind dealing with a few bugs to 1.5.

However, until this week I don't think I've found a compelling reason for anyone to use 1.5 rather than 1.0. That may have changed:

I've had the chance to do some reading about the direction of other projects. I found one theme in common ... lots of other projects also aiming to provide a great CMS together with a great forum.

Currently its an either or situation. You can have a great CMS in Joomla but you're stuck with Fireboard [2]. You can have a great forum in VBulletin but you'll have lackluster content management.

The Forum and CMS Integration Projects

• VBulletin is looking to add blogs and is able to become a portal with vBadvanced [3] and a social networking site with its new features [4].
• Drupal is able to extend its relatively basic forum with DrupalVB [5].
• Simple Machines Forum are planning a CMS to add to their forum [6].
• Joomla has two [7] projects [8] that aim to integrate it with phpBB3.

I can see Joomla coming out on top in this battle. Joomla and Simple Machines have and advantage because they will be available for free whereas a full VBulletin installation can easily cost over $500. Joomla then has the upper-hand over Simple Machines because SMF will need to build their CMS from scratch.

I'm tempted to think that that a successful integration with phpBB3 will become the killer app [9] that persuades a large number of people to upgrade to Joomla 1.5.

Do you agree? Is Joomla well positioned to beat these rivals? Are there other compelling reasons to upgrade to 1.5?

Update, a Challenge and Free Links

OK, Barrie from CompassDesigns has answered and he thinks that Joomsuite Content can be the killer app for Joomla 1.5 [10].

This is my challenge to you ... post what you think will be Joomla 1.5's killer app. Then drop a link in the comments and I'll add an additional link to your site right here.

Update 2

The developers of one bridge are asking for donations to help finish the project. More at Rocketwerx.com [11].

Source: Alledia.com [12]
Photo Credit, Elven Nicole [13]