Which CE version should I target?

Question

I have to develop module for magento community edition.

Latest version at the moment is 1.9.0.1, released about two weeks ago. There is 1.7.0.0 available for download, but it seems outdated — a 2012 release.

I did not found any data about version fragmentation of existing magento installations.

So, I'm asking here: which versions should I target?

you should always develop for the latest stable version of Magento — huzefam, Jun 10 '14 at 11:53
yeah, but what about those customers who haven't upgraded yet, or can't upgrade due to some reasons? — maniac, Jun 10 '14 at 12:02
Yes this is primarily opinion base, but I think it is a very important question and there are a lot of things which should be thought about before deciding for a set of versions to code against. — Fabian Blechschmidt, Jun 10 '14 at 14:34

Pronto · Accepted Answer · 2014-06-10T20:00:17.807

2

Your extensions should support anything newer than 1.7.0.2 (included) as these are versions usually found on live systems. You might not want to worry about older versions (unless you have enough time and resources), but there's very good chance that your software works with versions 1.5 and even 1.4 anyway. It's however almost certain that it DOESN'T work with anything older than 1.4 as there are considerable differences between 1.3 and 1.4.

TL;DR: If your software works with 1.7.0.2 and up, you're good to go.

edited Jun 10 '14 at 20:00

answered Jun 10 '14 at 12:46

Pronto

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The changes between 1.6 and 1.7 are mostly added features, not any core changes, so I would say 1.6. – Paul Hachmang Jun 10 '14 at 20:21

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 10 '14 at 12:11

It depends highly on your customers, as always: Invest as much as needed.

I have customers which run on CE 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.7, 1.8 and we just upgraded a few to 1.9.

There were big breaks between 1.5/1.6 introducing flat tables, change order, etc. to flat and changing mysql4 to resource.

In 1.8.1 form keys were introduced.

So if you have a defined customer set, ask them, which version they run and orient yourself on this. If you don't know I would recommend to target for 1.6, implement TESTs(!!) to easily check, whether your extension runs in all the versions and if needed, backport it later to 1.5 or earlier.

I think beside the problem, that you have a ancient magento version, a lot of shops are customized, so here you will get new problems.

Good luck!

Flat sales tables are included in 1.4.2, so anything below 1.5.x is probably a lot of work. — Paul Hachmang, Jun 10 '14 at 20:22

Which CE version should I target?

2 Answers2