Joomla! Forum - community, help and support

make a button inside the admin center that tells what version your on, if there are any updates, and a auto update feature... something to make updating to the newest version of joomla easier

Updating is a real task

There are several topics that handle this logic, please comment those. This is certainly not a white paper as we asked (see http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=500&t=265654), moving away to denied subforum.

Updating Joomla! is available through the "Advanced Tools for 1.5" third party extension. Check it out on the extensions site. It requires full write permission to your Joomla! instance however.

you'd think it would be built into joomla, making it easier to update and stay current.

Well you can't build everything into Joomla!, you have to a) stop developing and ship at some point and b) provide the ability for others to do things as easy as possible which is what we have. I'm sure Joomla! will develop the feature interally sooner or later, its just a matter of having the time to do it when there are more pressing issues available that can't be easily done with third party developers (such as ACL that doesn't require core hacks)

It should be noted that this supernice and convenient feature for end users represents some significant labor, oversight, and ongoing risks the Joomla team would have to deal with.

Mambo built it into their 4.6.x line and quickly proved unable to support it.

Probably you posted in the wrong forum...this is the Joomla! project, not Mambo

Is that a joke?

I meant to note that Mambo developed an autoupdate system and apparently it was too much to manage, so now you have this useless update panel in Mambo that gives wrong version information. Joomla would not want to replicate that failure. If you don't have the capacity to support this as a *service* then it's not a good *feature.*

The smiley indicates I was indeed joking a bit...

To be serious...I don't want to blame, flame or shout at the Mambo project at all. Joomla! originated from the Mambo project and I can only speak with respect to our past about Mambo. But what I try to say is that we are ranking amongst the top-3 CMS projects in the world, have an insane active community and an ever growing army of volunteers that keep this project moving. Take a look at the extensions directory and you will notice we are able to manage several thousand extensions, and almost 200.000 forum users (yes, our moderators do an insane job)..noticed the changes on our sites lately? The Mambo project show very to little activity, and as far as I can see there is no active community supporting this project any more...so the concerns are not valid if you ask me.

When we decided to implement this feature we where perfectly aware what this would mean, and we expect this not to be a very high additional piece of workload. I am more then happy to explain what the thoughts are in maintaining this (extensions developers would do the most work here), but that would exceed the purpose of this post.

I didn't realize it was selected as a feature/service to implement as this is the "not accepted" forum. Probably missed something in the thread...

Yes, Mambo lost the capacity to support the auto updater. Maybe they will recover it. I hope they are able to continue and be productive. I still have some Mambo sites, but probably not for long. It is indeed the CMS that gave rise to Joomla, among others, and I have never had any interest in the "politics" about it--just very unhappy when things fall apart and the support or development lags, forcing me to quit using something.

Hi dpk,

The reason that this was not accepted was that it wasn't a white paper, its a feature request. A white paper requires some more detail and proof of thought beyond "it'd be cool if Joomla! could update itself". If you look through the accepted list you will find the update system (or merged into one of the successful topics) as well as this feature request here.

As it stands there are tools and functionality that already exist that allow you to use Joomla! to self-update itself. Its not something I would particularly use in a corporate environment (because you should really do proper full change management which is not as simple as a self-update, especially on an outward facing site), but I do use it myself on my own sites. It is only at 1.5.4 at the moment but since I'm responsible for it I'll update it shortly. My update process at the moment is a bit expensive time wise but I haven't had the time to improve it yet which makes it one of those interesting paradoxes however as part of the 1.6 development I'm going to get something better designed to handle updates to make it not an issue any more. A lot of what we're looking at extends beyond just the simple updating the Core system into updating the extensions that are installed into the system as well. Its a big task but we feel that we have the capacity to complete the update functionality without issues like the Mambo project.

At the end yes its sad what happened however to limit it just to "politics" is an oversimplification of the situation. I'm certain that the Core Team at the time would have preferred the the antecedent events didn't occur but that was really out of their control. We provide solutions for moving from Mambo into Joomla!, I even completed some testing (at slight pain, seems they were getting sloppy with the installer as well) with the Migrator on Mambo and it should work to help you get those sites to Joomla! 1.5 if you so desire. We've tried our best to minimise the pain and I think we've mostly succeeded. The rest, as they say, is water under the bridge.

Cheers,

Sam