Wednesday, 07 January 2015

What you Need to Know About Joomla 2.5 End of Life and Upgrading to Joomla 3

You may be aware that Joomla 2.5 has reached the end of life (EOL) stage in its release cycle. This blog contains some information about the history of the Joomla release cycle, a timeline for upgrading to Joomla 3 and links to tools you can use to help upgrade when you’re ready.

upgrade joomla

Joomla Release Cycle History

In the past, Joomla released minor and major releases, which they called short and long term releases. Joomla 2.5, for example, was a long term release, and the 1.6 and 1.7 versions were it's preceeding short term releases. When version 3 became available, Joomla adopted an improved release cycle ensuring longer support for major versions. There are no longer short term and long term releases. Instead, releases are referred to as being “supported”, “current”, “legacy” or “stable”. Learn more about the Joomla release and support cycle.

Millions of Joomla 2.5 Users

The Joomla Project will no longer release any official patches for Joomla 2.5. That being said, at the time of this post, there are currently millions of Joomla 2.5 sites on the web. This even includes a portion of the Joomla.org family of websites. For those reasons, we are confident that a patch would be created should any major issues arise in the immediate future. We would be willing to contribute to a patch which would be applied to all Joomla 2.5 sites on the CloudAccess.net Platform.

Upgrading to Joomla 3

It is recommended that you upgrade to Joomla 3 at some point in the very near future. The good news is that we’ve created Upgrading to Joomla 3, a guided video tutorial demonstrating the steps you’ll need to take to upgrade to Joomla 3.

About the author

Jonathan James Gafill

Jonathan grew up a small town in Northern Michigan and spent a lot of his early years sailing, playing music and travelling. His interests both in and out of the classroom were focused on computers, robotics and many other techno shenanigans. For a decade Jonathan has been working on the web and sharpening his skills. He is known as a jack-of-all-trades and possesses the required knowledge to both foster and lead the various CloudAccess.net teams.