The new official site for Joomla Extensions, the Joomla Extensions Directory (JED) is online. The look has changed to get in line with the other new Joomla sites, but the structure of the new site hasn't changed that much,. This means people who are used to using the JED, will find their way on the new site in no time. In this article I mentioned a few points I didn't like about the old JED and I'm glad to see some of them are or will be a lot better in the new JED. Here are a few major changes:

• There is a new search function. A search to 'Image gallery' gave 834 results on the old JED. If I try this again on the new Extensions Directory, I get 131 results and most of them seem relevant. That's a great improvement.
• Extensions have to be GPL licenced. There is a transition period of 6 months to allow developers to adapt, but on July 1st, all remaining non GPL extensions will be removed. I really like this new policy, as it's just not logical that an open source project as Joomla has non GPL extensions. Some developers who are making their living from commercial extensions were already panicing, but they shouldn't. It is still allowed to have commercial extensions, as it is perfectly possibly to have a commercial extension with a GPL licence.
• 1.0 extensions will also be removed. There will also be a transition period of 6 months for this. It was already known that the timeline of Joomla 1.0 ends on July 1st 2009, so it is logical that the extensions for Joomla 1.0 only, will also be removed from JED. Some developers think this a problem. They say that a lot of sites are still using Joomla 1.0. These sites are stable and there is no reason to upgrade to Joomla 1.5. What if they want to add an extension to these sites in the future? Of course they do have a point. On July 1st a lot of sites will still be based on Joomla 1.0. But do we have to keep all these 1.0 extensions in the JED just for that? I don't think so. These 1.0 extensions will not disappear and I'm sure it won't take long before someone starts making a list with links to all these old extensions. I think it's better to keep the JED for Joomla 1.5 only and keep the old extensions somewhere in a seperate list. This will make it easier for both Joomla 1.5 and 1.0 users. So also here, I think this will be a great improvement for the JED.