QIIME 2 has succeeded QIIME 1

As of 1 January 2018, QIIME 2 has succeeded QIIME 1. QIIME 1 is no longer officially supported, as our development and support efforts are now focused entirely on QIIME 2. We’re looking forward to helping our users transition to QIIME 2, and the best place to get started is in the QIIME 2 documentation.

Our design of QIIME 2 has been heavily influenced by interactions with our users at workshops and on the QIIME 1 and QIIME 2 forums, and we think you’ll like the new system. New features include improved microbiome analysis methods (see the QIIME 2 tutorials for details), different interface types, integrated provenance tracking (so you’ll always be able to tell how your data, visualizations, or statistics were generated), the plugin architecture (which makes it easier for method developers to get their tools to QIIME users), and the new interactive visualizations (see a few examples in the Gallery at https://view.qiime2.org/).

Some users have asked what it means for QIIME 1 to no longer be officially supported. This means that QIIME 1 developers will no longer be making updates to the code (for example, bug fixes, new features, documentation, etc.), nor providing new QIIME 1 releases. We will also no longer provide official support on the QIIME 1 Forum.

While official support is being dropped, the software itself and existing releases will remain available for use, and the website will remain live. The source code will also continue to be available at https://github.com/biocore/qiime. We will also keep the QIIME 1 Forum around in case anyone wants to ask questions and receive unofficial support for QIIME 1 (e.g., from community members). QIIME 1 developers will not be monitoring the forum, however, and we make no guarantees that existing QIIME 1 releases will continue to function into the future (for example, if an upstream dependency breaks an existing QIIME 1 release, we won’t be there to fix it).

The QIIME 1 Amazon EC2 and VirtualBox images will also continue to be available, so even if a release of QIIME 1 isn’t natively installable anymore at some point (for example, due to a change in a dependency), you should still be able to use those virtual machines for as long as the images are supported by Amazon or VirtualBox.

Finally, we will no longer use this blog (http://blog.qiime.org) to communicate announcements to our users. Instead, we will use the Announcements category on the QIIME 2 Forum. This is where you’ll be able to find information about QIIME releases, upcoming workshops, software bugs, etc. The most important announcements also go to the @qiime2 Twitter account.

If you haven’t started migrating over to QIIME 2 yet, now is the time to do so. To obtain official support for QIIME 2, please post questions on the QIIME 2 Forum.

Thanks to all of our users of QIIME 1 over the past seven and a half years. We look forward to continuing to work with you on QIIME 2!

Greg (on behalf of the QIIME 1 developers)