On 10th December 2014, the Joomla core product team released Joomla 2.5.28, the last planned release in the v2.5 series. As a result, all further Joomla core development efforts will go towards Joomla 3.x and beyond, and v2.5 will be officially declared End Of Life (EOL) as of 1st January 2015. Here is why this should be news of some import to you.
Firstly, EOL does not mean that your Joomla site will simply stop working come New Year’s Day. Oh, no, that would be too easy. Instead, what it will mean is that the Joomla core team will no longer officially care about v2.5 – if a security vulnerability was discovered the next day, it is highly likely that the only patch available (if at all) would be a community-contributed one. It also means that Joomla extension developers (including Digital Peak) will gradually consider dropping support for the Joomla 2.5 series.
You do not have to upgrade your Joomla installation to 3.x if you don’t want to, as long as you remain up-to-date about any security vulnerabilities that might crop up afterwards, and you can use unofficial patches to keep your system secure. However, if you rely on Joomla extensions to any significant degree (and let’s be honest, most of us do), then be aware that more and more, extensions will be written to require v3.x or higher, and the extension developers will themselves also stop supporting issues or queries related to v2.5 at some point. If you have a reasonably good backup of all your databases (or at least your data), now would be a good time to start deploying and testing Joomla 3.x so that you can ensure a worry-free migration.
The strategy of Digital Peak
In the interests of full and public disclosure, here is how Digital Peak will be handling Joomla 2.5’s EOL. We will continue to support v2.5 on DPCalendar 4.2.x and GAnalytics 3.2.x (the last branch that can be installed on v2.5) through March 2015, giving you that time to migrate to Joomla 3.x with all the support resources available to help you out. So what does support mean on that versions? We will provide bug fix releases till March 2015 when the next major major version 5 of DPCalendar is planed. Till then the branch 4.2 should be pretty stable on Joomla 2.5. For sure we will accept also support cases on our case management system. After June 2015 (which is a half year after the end of life) we will REFUSE support on Joomla 2.5 installations. Means cases on our support platform which belong to a Joomla 2.5 web site will be closed immediately.
There is always an exception
If a vulnerability is discovered in the Joomla 2.5 branches of our products then we will create releases with a fix and you will be informed through our newsletter. So be sure that your E-Mail address on your joomla.digital-peak.com account is valid!!
How to migrate to Joomla 3
For more information on how and why to migrate your site to the latest version of Joomla, visit their Why Migrate page. If you migrate your web site to Joomla 3 then there is no special actions required to update our extensions. They should work as before. If you did some template overrides then you need to adapt them as well. But you have to create a new template anyway. The best thing would be completely remove all template overrides during the upgrade and them move them back piece by piece.