I have been studying the new documentation for the new Beta version of Joomla! 1.6. One of the changes from Joomla 1.5 is to the structure of the xml manifest file for Joomla extensions, which is used to install extensions through the Joomla installer.

The main change seems to be that the primary tag is now

<extension></extension>

which replaces

<install></install>

This may seem like a small point, but, before Joomla 1.6 is officially released, I really want to make a plea for not doing that. We at Spiral Scripts have developed a number of extensions that work with Joomla 1.5. We have been hoping that with a little tweaking our extensions will work successfully with versions 1.5 and 1.6 of Joomla. Unfortunately I think that this change to the syntax of the manifest file will make this impossible, as it will mean that a separate installation package is required according to which version of Joomla is being run.

It seems to me that this will make life unnecessarily complicated for a lot of people. If there really is a strong reason for changing the tag then fine, but it appears that this is in fact just change for the sake of it, since so far as I can tell the rest of the structure of the manifest file will be much the same as for Joomla 1.5. So please, don't do it.