Last week some rumours came up that the next generation of Joomla! would have a version number higher than 1.1.x. There were some hot discussions on their forums about the sense of a bigger version number change, but the core team now has decided to change the version number of the 1.1 branch of Joomla to 1.5. The reasons for that decision can be read here.
Anyway - the underlying code has changed SO much that the next bigger Joomla release will not have much in common with the recent one, except the old function names (which were left in there to maintain downward compatiblity with older components, modules & mambots - now called plugins). You can checkout from their SVN repository each day - you will always have at least 50 modified files.
VirtueMart currently can't be used on a Joomla! 1.5, there are some issues with the toolbar and the administration menu. But I will keep an eye on these issues so we can fix them soon.
A first beta version of Joomla! 1.5 is to be released in April - so stay tuned.
