The point is,
Whatever 'upgrade to 3.x' entails - it's utterly NOT what the
official upgrade documentation would lead you to believe.
To wit:
If you are currently running a Joomla! release on a server with PHP 5.3.10 or later, we encourage you to update immediately to Joomla! 3.3.3 via either the one-click update or the update downloads available at
http://www.joomla.org/download.html.
Yeah... RIGHT! "
One Click Update"??
Here is the kicker... on that same page it says "Note: Please read the
update instructions before updating." OK, the page linked to by 'update instructions' isn't quite what you were looking for, but on there is another link which will take you to
http://docs.joomla.org/J2.5:Upgrading_f ... ng_version
Method A - Update Method (Recommended) -
KIDDING?!?!?!?
This is a
joke, as clearly the one-click upgrade FAILS on a vast array of installations. But this page gives no
hint of the prep and workarounds actually required.
Frankly, that kind of totally misleading documentation strikes me as just plain unacceptable for a CMS system of this scope, with so many commercial enterprises depending on it. (Not just commercial users - whole
industries of Joomla extension developers!).
Myself, I represent a small fragment of the commercial 'user' category, and when a software framework goes EOL - then it's ABSOLUTELY time to leave it behind. The security ramifications of unsupported CMS's are well-documented, and every single day I still get hundreds of scans on my servers, from numerous Chinese and Ukrainian bot-nets scanning for common CMS backdoors.
And lets face it, CMS's like JOOMLA - which in the real world are held together mostly with duct-tape and rubber bands in the form of numerous 3rd-party add-ons which can barely keep up with the continuous unrelenting progression of the CMS, which can barely keep up with the continuous unrelenting progression of the framework, which
never seems to be able to keep up with the continuous unrelenting progression of the PHP language (ever looked at your PHP WARNINGS log?) - are inherently fragile systems.
When a company is holding personal and financial data for 30,000 users on their server... well, it just makes no sense from a business ( or liability!) standpoint to be running some old long-deprecated totally unsupported CMS, no matter how solid it may appear in terms of its outward performance.
If it ain't broke - that's one thing... but
if it ain't SUPPORTED, it ain't SECURE!
