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More about Joomla 1.0 end-of-life

4 October 2008

A commenter on Johan’s post about Joomla 1.0′s end-of-life wrote:

“Also its the old argument, why upgrade if its working fine? Why move to 1.5 when 1.0 is working just fine for me and my users? Why move to Vista if XP is working just fine for me and my users.”

I absolutely agree that you don’t need to upgrade when a site is working fine and doing everything you need. However, if a security vulnerability is discovered in Joomla 1.0, and no one fixes it, you are in trouble. So it’s best to upgrade to 1.5 before the expiration date of 1.0.

Software versions are never maintained ad infinitum. Some projects, like Ubuntu, have a strict end-of-life policy for each release. You always know in advance exactly how much time you have to upgrade.

Setting an end-of-life date for Joomla

Joomla hasn’t set an official end-of-life date yet for 1.0 (or 1.5 for that matter). This might sound like you still have a lot of time to upgrade, but that might not be the case. Joomla is a volunteer driven open source project. It’s dependent on how much people ‘feel like’ maintaining an older version. I doubt anyone in the project feels like doing a lot of work on 1.0 anymore, so in reality, the lifecycle could already have ended without any of us knowing it.

So that’s why we feel it’s important for the Joomla project to announce an official date for Joomla 1.0′s end-of-life asap. It serves as a promise to the community that until this date, issues will be fixed. We propose March 6, aka 03/06/09. That leaves everyone plenty of time, and it’s an easy date to remember.

It’s up to the community now to speak up: do you agree, do you think it’s too soon, or too late? Are you upgrading to 1.5 or not at all? This way we help the Joomla project to make an informed decision.

  • http://friendfeed.com/u0421793 Ian Tindale

    But March the 6th is 06/03/09.

    Your 03/06/09 is, of course, the third of June next year.

    Easy to be confused about, more like.

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    That depends on the system you use. Month/day/year is used in the US, also in spoken english (March 6 instead of 6 March as in many other languages). Obviously the only good format is year/month/day, which works especially in combination with hours:minutes:second, because then you end up with a list from big to small. So unless people start talking like programmers, it will always be confusing :-)

  • http://blog.jdlh.com Jim DeLaHunt

    I’m being kept on Joomla 1.0.x because I want the combination of a Content Management System, and multiple languages, and human-friendly URLs. Joomla + JoomFish + sh404SEF gives me this, albeit with some flaws. JoomFish doesn’t support Joomla 1.5 yet (though there is an RC out), and Nooku isn’t available yet except to sponsors.

    So, my migration date will be driven by when I can get access to tools for multi-lingual support and human-friendly URLs for Joomla 1.5.x. I hope that will be long before March 2009, but I don’t think it’s here yet.

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    As you know, we are solving the whole problem of multilingual j1.5 with human friendly translatable URLs: http://www.nooku.org/en/buzz/76-nooku-06-puts-focus-on-seo.html
    You can already get access to it: either through our partners or by becoming a partner yourself. This helps us fund development, and at the same time we get valuable feedback, without having to support thousands of users straight away.
    And finally, it probably won’t take until March before we do a public release.

  • http://joocode.com/blog Flavio Copes

    I’d set the end-of-life date of Joomla 1.0 to the day that Joomla 1.6 will be released.

    Obviusly, Joomla can’t support 3 so-much-different version. So when a new major version comes out, the oldest one should be dropped.

    @Mathias: I just can’t wait for Nooku. :)

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    That makes sense; Unfortunately no one knows when 1.6 will be ready, so no one knows how long 1.0 will be supported. With a fixed date, webmasters will have clarity.

  • http://brian.teeman.net Brian Teeman

    Of course being an open source product there is nothing to say that a grop of experienced joomla developers dont take it upon themselves to offer security updates even after the joomla project ceases to support version 1.0

  • http://www.newlocalmedia.com dpk

    The reality is that tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of sites are still running Mambo 4.5.x and numerous other outdated CMSes. There will be millions of Joomla 1.0 sites in existence for many years to come. They will be upgraded or abandoned when they are hacked.

    Many websites were not built by the people who operate them, and the people who operate them lack the knowledge or the funds to execute an upgrade. This problem is exacerbated by compatibility gaps and the lack of a good migration system between versions, as with Joomla 1.0-1.5 and Drupal 5-6.

    Just think of the time and costs for a major migration project involving sites with thousands of articles and many custom plugins.

  • http://www.joomlacommunity.eu Sander

    The official ‘end of life’ date is now set to July 22, 2009. More info: http://community.joomla.org/contributor-blogs/64-developer-team-blog/509-an-old-friend-comes-of-age.html

  • http://mathiasverraes.com Mathias Verraes

    Hehe, looks like we triggered some internal debate :-)

  • http://kotarski.co.uk Nick Kotarski

    Well 1.0 has an end of life date now. July rather than March as you had suggested.

    Nick

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