Proposing a new release strategy

Hello awesome Mauticians!

We've been listening to the feedback from users of Mautic about the release cadence and availability of longer term support.

After some great discussion in the Product Team Slack channel in regards to the points raised in the great presentation at Mautic Conference Global by Mattias Michaux, we've developed a proposal for a new release schedule for Mautic.

This new proposal will see us:

• Providing a five-year lifetime for each major version of Mautic from initial release to End of Life
  
  
• Ensuring that security support for a previous release only ends after the next release has been out for 12 months and it's in Long Term Support, giving longer to update and a an extensively tested, stable release by the time it's mandatory to upgrade
  
  
• Providing a Long Term Support (LTS) release which is supported for 18 months, with the option to extend through a paid Extended Long Term Support program for a further 24 months (ELTS will be for a period of 12 months, in the diagram you'll see ELTS1 and ELTS2 which refer to the two supported periods for that release).
  
  
• Supporting major Symfony versions in advance of when they reach End of Life, ensuring that our software remains up to date with the latest and most secure releases of our underlying framework.

Some points to clarify:

• We are currently playing catch-up with Symfony releases, to facilitate this Mautic 6 will be a 'bridging release' which only has one minor version, 6.0, which will be the LTS release. This allows us to focus on catching up with Symfony in time for the 6.0 End of Life in November 2027
• ELTS support ends when the supported Symfony major version reaches End of Life, therefore Mautic 6.0 will only have 12 months of ELTS support before it reaches End of Life. All subsequent releases, and Mautic 5, will have 24 months of ELTS support.
• We have allowed 9 months of development (alpha, beta and release candidate) prior to each major release, however the step between 6.0 and 7.0 is very short. We anticipate needing more development resources to support this update which we aim to fund through the ELTS program.
• Internally we will specify the exact dates we plan to release each version - this overview is rolled up into quarters for ease of understanding and planning.

Please check the new proposal here (screenshot below) in a visual timeline format, and leave your thoughts and comments below.