3aIT Blog

 

Version 2.5 of our go-to CMS for most major website projects, Joomla, is approaching end-of-life. From 31st December 2014, this version of Joomla will no longer be supported. This means that any security issues found will no longer be patched, and extensions will no longer be developed for this version.

Therefore, if you are running a site with this version of Joomla installed, you should be planning to upgrade to version 3.x right now! Fortunately, the upgrade between 2.5 -> 3.x is much easier than the upgrade from 1.5 -> 2.5 was. While your site is unlikely to work perfectly straight away after the upgrade (and therefore doing this directly on a live site is highly unadvisable), there have been relatively few changes that might cause important things to break, and the things that have changed are usually fairly easy to fix.

One thing to bear in mind is that version 3 requires a PHP version greater than 5.3.10 on the hosting server it is running on, so this is worth checking before upgrading.

Aside from the usual security reasons for upgrading, there's also been a whole host of improvements made. The admin interface has had a big visual mobile-friendly overhaul. They've also added versioning (allowing you to revert to previous versions of an article), article tagging, one click updates, and lots of changes on the technical side to increase the flexibility available to developers.

If you are still running Joomla 2.5 (or older) and would like help upgrading, please contact us and we'll take a look!