Updating Joomla 1.6
May/111
Regular users of Joomla! will have got used to patching their installation with FTP or on the command line. You may not be aware but the new versions of Joomla!, 1.6 and beyond, have built in updating. Here’s a very quick guide to updating Joomla! 1.6 yourself.
1. Login to your Joomla! administrator area ( www.domainname.com/administrator/ )
2. Go to Extensions > Extension Manager > And click on “Update”
3. Click on “Find Updates” in the top right and Joomla will automatically find any potential updates available to you.
4. If you see that Joomla is now listed, you should check the box next to “Joomla” and click “Update”.
5. Joomla will automatically update you to the latest version.
Find Updates
Notes: Joomla does not check automatically – administrators need to run the check from the control panel.
The “Find Updates” button is in the top right – the menu area that’s hardly ever used in Joomla and often missed.
With Joomla 1.7 about to be released, developers are wondering how many more updates of 1.6 there will be.
2020Media will be very happy to advise and help with any software update including making complete backups for you.
More information on our Joomla hosting can be found at www.2020media.com/joomla.
VirtueMart 2 almost ready
May/110
VirtueMart, the popular opensource shopping cart extension for Joomla, have announced the availability of the release candidate of version 2 of the package.
The long awaited release of VirtueMart 2 means there will be one final bugfix and then the software will be ready to use in production. Also in the announcement was news that Joomla 1.6 is not being supported in this release after all. The developers say that as Joomla 1.6 is only being supported by Joomla for 6 months, and 1.7 will be out in around 2 months time – therefore they have not had enough time to develop VirtueMart around Joomla 1.6.
No doubt this news will disappoint some developers who have been eagerly awaiting a fully featured ecommerce add-on compatible with Joomla 1.6, but VirtueMart 2 is a complete rewrite from scratch and will fix many of the outstanding gripes people have with the extension.
The Release Candidate contains a lot new features:
- Media Handler (multiple images)
- Custom Fields (replacing the old attributes, producttypes, variants,…)
- True Child Products in the sense of OOP (unpublished parents can be used as linked product pattern)
- Mail template system
- New Currency Formatting possibilities
- More Modules and Plugins
- New Admin Menu Layout
- Meta Tags
- More Filters and Search Options
- Completely Anonymous Checkout
- Revenue Report
- New Templates
2020Media can provide a completely free installation of VirtueMart with any of our Joomla hosting plans – seee www.2020media.com/plans for further details.
CiviCRM for Drupal 7 and Joomla 1.6
Apr/111
CiviCRM 4.0.0 has been released for the latest Drupal version – 7 and the new Joomla version – 1.6. Up until now it was necessary to install CiviCRM on the older Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5.
Highlights
- CiviCampaign has been integrated with other components such as CiviContribute, CiviMember, CiviEvent, CiviMail and CiviEngage
- Joomla v1.6 introduced an ACL based permissioning system. This gets CiviJoomla to much closer parity with CiviDrupal.
- CiviMember now allows membership upsell. This allows membership type to be changed on renewal
- CiviCRM Extensions. You can now browse and download CiviCRM extensions from within your CiviCRM install.
- A new API – version 3, introduces standardisation of functions, inputs and outputs.
For users of existing Drupal 6 and Joomla 1.5 CiviCRM installs, the simultaneous release of 3.4 for these versions includes the same features.
2020Media provides free installation of CiviCRM on all Drupal and Joomla hosting plans.
Ease of Upgrade – Joomla, WordPress, Drupal
Feb/111
Comparison of the upgrade methods used in Joomla, WordPress and Drupal
Popular content management systems require updating from time to time. Sometimes this is for new features, often because a security loophole needs patching. In this article we’re not going to look at which CMS most often requires updates, but at the upgrade procedure itself. How easy is it, are the instructions clear and easy to follow, what the potential problems, and what can you do if something goes wrong? At the time of writing new major versions of Drupal (7.0) and Joomla (1.6) have been released and no updates have yet been produced for these releases. We therefore concentrate on the older versions, which run the vast majority of existing sites.
Joomla User Group January
Jan/110
With the release of Joomla 1.6 just announced the question on everyone’s lips was: “Should I upgrade?”. After some discussion the group decided that at this point, an upgrade should not be done to an existing site. Only if a new site was being built should Joomla 1.6 be used.
Joomla 1.5 will be fully supported for at least 1 year, so there is time for the new release to settle in, and perhaps easy upgrade tools will be developed.
Some of the developers at the meeting also said they’d not be using Joomla 1.6 just yet as it was likely to contain some bugs and they’d wait for Joomla 1.6.4 (or thereabouts) to be released.
The discussion on Joomla 1.6 moved on to Molajo, which is a package of Joomla components plus some coding changes over the standard Joomla. Molajo was set up fairly recently by some of the people who have had a lot of involvment in Joomla. It remains to be seen whether it will develop into a true fork of Joomla, or if the features tried out and testing in Molajo will make their way back to the core. Check out Nooku framework too.
The main presentation described how to get started with creating a new Joomla template. Melvyn Phillips showed how to use an off-the-shelf CSS framework to quickly put together a grid based site. Given the complexity of Joomla, creating a new template may seem offputting to many. Melvyn showed us how to create a basic 3 column template from scratch in just 5 minutes.
2020Media was recently asked to take over hosting of a legacy Joomla 1.0 website and we completed the migration successfully this week. The customers website had been broken because their host upgraded their server to a new version of PHP without telling them. At 2020Media we never do this.
For any enquiries about Joomla 1.5, 1.6 or even 1.0, please contact us.
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