As many of our users are aware, we’re very actively developing QIIME 2, which offers many benefits over QIIME 1. As of 1 January 2018, we will no longer support QIIME 1, in order to focus our effort entirely on QIIME 2. This means that, beginning in January, we will no longer monitor the QIIME 1 forum, provide bug fixes for QIIME 1, or have any future releases of QIIME 1. We will also discontinue the QIIME 1 Blog at that time, in favor of the QIIME 2 Forum Announcements. As of the QIIME 1.9.0 release, we’re no longer adding new features to QIIME 1, as we focus our development effort on QIIME 2.
Our goal is to make this transition as smooth as possible for our user community. To prepare for this change, we recommend that our users start familiarizing themselves with QIIME 2 now. New QIIME users should begin learning QIIME 2, not QIIME 1.
The documentation for QIIME 2 is available at https://docs.qiime2.org. Start with our Getting Started document for a description of how we think you should work through the documentation to most effectively learn QIIME 2. You can get help with QIIME 2 on the QIIME 2 Forum, where you should start by reading our forum Code of Conduct. We’re also in the early stage of preparing a document to help translate QIIME 1 commands to QIIME 2 commands. We plan to re-implement the QIIME 1 commands that we believe are the most used, but not the commands that we don’t think are used (for example, because they provide outdated methods).
We’re looking forward to helping our users transition to QIIME 2. We think you’ll like the new features, including different interface types (including a prototype graphical user interface!), integrated provenance tracking, improved microbiome analysis methods, a plugin architecture, and the new interactive visualizations.
As always, thanks for using QIIME!
QIIME News and Announcements 