[Ed. Note: this was originally published on a now-defunct site in 2013. Republished (and back-dated) here because seven years later people are still running old versions of Joomla 1.5! Also, Joomla is still a far better CMS than WP. WordPress is like the Microsoft of CMS systems… everyone is using it, but not because it’s the best solution.]
According to W3Techs, as of the beginning of July 2013, 63% of all Joomla sites are running version 1.x. Of these, some 92% are running version 1.5. That works out to a rather large 58% of all Joomla sites running 1.5! The other 5% are mostly version 1.6 and 1.7. [Aside: if your site is one of those 5% please just upgrade now. It’s not going to be that painful and you are a sitting duck for hackers. By “now” I mean stop reading this and go upgrade. Seriously.]
So why is the number so high? There are usually a long list of factors, and most of them are valid. Here are the ones I hear regularly:
Simply porting the site is going to be a lot of work.
We just did our site a few years ago and don’t have the budget for it.
Things we rely upon didn’t make it to 2.5.
We hate change.
The site is outdated; if we’re going to update it we want to redesign it and that’s a big job.
There’s no reason to upgrade (AKA “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”).
You’re only telling me I need to upgrade because you want more business.
Every web site is different, so each of the reasons above can be more or less relevant depending on circumstances. At one end of the spectrum is the hobby site that generates no revenue, and doesn’t have much traffic. A site that could be off line for a few weeks or months and not suffer. I’m going to exclude them from this discussion.
For everyone else, the question to ask is “what’s the cost of having my site suddenly go to an ‘under construction’ page?” What’s the monetary value? What’s the value of lost reputation? Take a serious look at your situation and try to come up with a reasonable number. Compare this with the cost of upgrading your site. If the numbers are close, it’s probably a good idea to start budgeting. If the cost is significantly higher than upgrading, find the budget now because it’s time to start planning!
Here’s the key issue: the technologies that Joomla uses, most significantly PHP, are also changing over time. This chart illustrates the problem for Joomla 1.5:
PHP Version
Runs Joomla 1.5?
Status
5.2
Yes
Unsupported, past end-of-life, no updates.
5.3
Yes
End-of-Life cycle started March 2013, critical updates only.
5.4
NO
Supported.
5.5
NO
Supported (available as of June 2013).
To put it clearly: there is no currently supported version of PHP that will run Joomla 1.5! While that shouldn’t be panic-inducing, it is not something to be ignored. There’s a lot of code out there (not just Joomla) that will have problems running under PHP 5.4, and lots of hosting companies will continue to support it, including Abivia. But – and this is a big one – sooner or later your host is going to send out a notice saying that they’re moving to PHP 5.4 or 5.5. Depending on the host, you’re likely to get anywhere between a week to 90 days notice. Even at 90 days, that’s a pretty tight timeline for a mid-range site, particularly if you want to throw in a redesign at the same time.
This problem is made particularly challenging by the fact that the PHP folks chose to stick with the same major version number, even though they made some major changes to the language. There are some hosts who are just now retiring PHP 4. This was made possible because hosts could run PHP 4 in parallel with PHP 5. By not making recent versions PHP 6 and PHP 7, this mechanism is no longer available. If a host wants to support 5.4, they have to drop support for 5.3 at the same time.
So put your finger on the calendar a month from today, whatever day you happen to be reading this. Imagine that at the same moment you’re doing that, you get a notice from your host saying “PHP 5.3 will not longer supported after…” and substitute the date under your finger. If that makes you uncomfortable, then it’s time to start planning your upgrade!
With very few exceptions, I’m opposed to capital punishment. In my book, murder is murder, whether it’s committed by individuals or the state.
In this case, the convicted are being used as an example, in hopes that the severity of the punishment will change the behaviour of others, and shift the culture of violence. That’s a good thing. It will very likely save more innocent lives than the cost of the four convicted. This makes it not a moral decision, not an issue of justice for the victims, but an issue of body count mathematics and of cultural shock therapy.
Throughout the world, women don’t have anything resembling equality with men, be it violent rape in India or malicious Internet based harassment in North America. Numerous more gentle efforts seem to improve the situation in one aspect, but not prevent the development of new avenues for discrimination and harassment. We fix mechanisms but changing the culture remains an elusive, distant goal.
In this context, the decision to execute these four young men may very well be the right one. That doesn’t mean it isn’t troubling in many ways. Not only is the use of state sanctioned murder difficult to accept, it is more that this blunt instrument appears to be the only effective tool. This above all demonstrates our inadequacy when it comes to making women an equal part of society. More than sixty years after the wave of post-WWII feminism, and we’re still not past this.
There’s no lack of evidence to show that there are people in the world who think that an appropriate response to the misdeeds of the West is to bring the death and destruction back and throw it in our faces. I fail to understand this logic of revenge, but unfortunately there are many who embrace it. Humanity has a long history on the failure of using evil to counter evil, but we never seem to convert this knowledge into wisdom.
This might be surprising, but because of this I’m not entirely opposed to governments communications surveillance for security reasons, even the communications of their own citizens – after all most acts of terror come from hateful people within our culture, not from the stereotypes the media is so enamoured with. (more…)
By now, just about everyone has heard about Marissa Mayer’s first big public move as newly-minted CEO of Yahoo, Inc.: no more remote work, issuing a directive that all remote employees need to show up at a physical Yahoo office.
This has resulted in a storm of criticism from journalists, armchair-CEO’s, and remote workers around the world (including me). (more…)
One has to give LinkedIn credit for trying to be more than just a network of vague business connections. They have a difficult challenge: Investors and advertisers value them more on membership numbers than on the quality of the connections in the network, yet the quality of the network is the primary value for those members. (more…)
For the past few years, the leading edge of online marketing has been “content marketing”. As advertising becomes increasingly ineffective at driving sales, and as most lead generation tends to come via search engines, marketers have figured out how to produce content that ranks well in search, which brings traffic, which converts to sales/revenue/whatever.
The problem is that as more and more people buy into this, there has been a subtle change. Now the industry is engaging in “marketing content” rather than “content marketing”. The result is a flood of low quality content. Ten thousand blogs, all rehashing the same information in slightly different ways. So much duplication and plagiarism that it’s impossible to tell who had an original idea, if anyone. (more…)
I’ve spent a good part of the holidays trying to reconcile the over-saturation in my life. Of the large number of things I’d like to be doing, I’m coming up against the realization that I’m attempting to do too many of them. The result is a spectrum of underachievement. (more…)
Let me start this with full disclosure. Although I am not a member of the wine writing community, I have close ties to it. I have a business relationship with two of the writers who have complained about theft of their content, and I know several more personally. Additionally I have business and personal relationships with several small wineries and winemakers.
I’m also a wanna-be writer, although not in the field of wine journalism, or more accurately in the field of writing about wine. I say that because calling some of this “journalism” would be an insult to the word, even the watered-down definition that has emerged in the Internet age.
Natalie MacLean stands accused of appropriating wine reviews from other writers, reproducing excerpts without permission or acknowledgement. The details can be found on this article from Palate Press. Interestingly, another set of allegations emerges in the comments, but that’s for others to pursue. (more…)
Conservatives typically look to shrink the role of the state. Their favourite tool of choice is the reduction of revenues through tax cuts. The theory appears to be that a reduction in tax revenue will lead to the elimination of the services that are not essential to the operation of the state. This is in many ways a perverse application of the principles of the free market system. Not only does it not work as planned, it frequently results in structural budgetary deficits.
Liberals tend to look at increasing the role of the state. They see the state as a tool for ensuring the well being of the populace. Their favourite tool of choice is the introduction of new services or regulations, with a corresponding increase in revenue from taxation. The theory appears to be that centralized management can be efficient. This is in many ways wilful ignorance of the merits of the free market system. Not only does it not work as planned, unbridled growth of taxation is an impediment to economic growth.
By and large, that’s a capsule summary of politics in the West. Two diametrically opposed, equally incorrect, deeply flawed models for government, alternately taking control of the apparatus of the state, making a set of ill-informed changes before being turfed out by dissatisfied voters to let the other side repeat the process from the opposite perspective.
This is an unstable system that will never reach equilibrium.
The fundamental issue is one of semantics. So let’s start with an axiom: nobody enjoys paying taxes. Aside from extremists who either envision a magic state that functions in the absence of revenue or an equally improbable state that functions in the absence of variable rewards for variable work/value, most of us accept that some level of taxation is inevitable. The problem is that we think about taxes in absolute terms — usually as a percentage of our income or assets. It seems to be that both liberals and conservatives could find a lot more common ground if the discussion was framed in terms of Return on Taxation, much like business measures Return on Investment.
Surely everyone, left or right, wants to ensure that their tax dollars are used to achieve the greatest value.
While it is true that this approach will generate ongoing argument on which methods should be used to arrive at a measurement of “return”, my suspicion is that liberals and conservatives will find that when viewed through the lens of value, their policies will be less divergent. In an ideal scenario, we can focus our efforts on getting more value per tax dollar and adopt more rational — and stable — policies.
The left and right seem to find it increasingly difficult to find common ground, but it is only by doing so that a democratic system can function effectively. Let’s make Return on Taxation the objective we all share.
This is a story of feature creep. We started with an idea that was truly useful: link shortening services. These services allowed people to take bloated SEO-laden links (like the ones on this blog) and reduce them to compact links under 20 characters. Perfect for pasting into an e-mail, even better for a length-limited Tweet.
But link shortening isn’t rocket science, and I’m guessing even the US Patent and Trademark Office thought the idea too obvious for a patent (I mention this only because that in itself is an anomalous achievement, but I won’t digress into another patent rant here). So competitors emerged pretty quickly. How do you distinguish yourself in the link shortening business? Simple, add statistics! (BTW “statistics” is the plain old boring word for “analytics”, which is a made-up crapword designed to fool marketers into thinking they’re not doing math).
Then after statistics, some brain cell thought up the idea of loading the target window in a frame, adding a “value-added” toolbar. Not that the value add was provided to the user, who got to lose a little screen space and not see the actual target URL, but for the person providing the link, who presumably could track minutiae like how long you spent on some page.
Next, services hopped onto the bandwagon. Twitter, Facebook, RSS feed aggregators and others all started adding a link-shortening, information gathering layer to any links posted on their sites.
So now we have a link on Twitter that goes to a short link generated by the author of the tweet. The author of the tweet has copied a link found on Facebook, which then redirects to a short link to a blog aggregation that goes to the bloggers short link that then goes to the post.
Six degrees of redirection. Each one making the web more brittle, more subject to the loss of an intermediary, less permanent, less connected. Every time one of these services goes out of business, hundreds of useful connections between content will get lost forever. None of this is good.
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