Joomla 3.5.0 Disable Plugin System - Joomla! Update Notifica

[nfleming]

I notice that in Joomla 3.5.0 the plugin System - Joomla! Update Notification is ENABLED by default.

This is a nuisance to those of us who are developers and have numerous clients - for example we have nearly 100 Joomla sites. These days we do NOT apply the latest Joomla core update for at least a couple of weeks (unless it is an urgent security release) because Joomla core has been notorious in recent years for releasing a number of versions in quick succession. Due to the new setting in Joomla 3.5 we will receive around 100 emails a day informing us of a Joomla update that we already know about. How annoying!

Can the plugin be changed back to be DISABLED by default?

Also, the email sent out has the wrong plugin name in it, the email says To disable these emails, please unpublish the 'System - Joomla! Update Email'
plugin in the Plugin Manager on your site.
When actually the plugin is System - Joomla! Update Notification


Regards
Nicola

[AlexVega]

Hi there,

Yes is possible, Go to Extensions > Plugins > System - Joomla! Update Notification.

Cheers.

[kaybee57]

Agreed - all our clients are sending me the email asking "what's this"?
We have our own update timelines in place so it will be something I will now have to disable every time we run our updates.

[coaleb]

Agreed, receiving an update notification every day: not a great idea. This one was not well thought out.

Many production sites are slow to update, especially since Joomla updates tend to break things. Sending daily emails like this can only have two results in a professional scenario: Annoying the developer to tears or nagging the customer to death until they attempt an update that will likely destroy their site (as well as their relationship with the developer and their opinion of Joomla as a viable CMS option).

While I understand the concept, I think sending one email per release would have been more than sufficient.

[coaleb]

The Joomla project doesn't see this as a problem and has no intention of changing it. You can see the issue posted here:
https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/is ... -234068094

So my advice to anyone having this issue is visit Extensions > Plugins in their back-end, search for the System - Joomla! Update Notification system plugin, and disable it. This will stop the daily email madness.

Keep in mind that you will need to manually check for updates regularly.

- Brian

[kaybee57]

All very well and not a problem if there's only one or 2 sites you have built or own, it's just another 'thing' we developers have to do on every site we build - head to the plug-in and turn it off. But now that we know how to turn it off, it can just be added to our checklist on building a website.

[coaleb]

Agreed, the idea was sound, but the execution was poor. I spent a fair amount of time yesterday visiting all the sites I manage and disabling the plugin. No more emails :-)

[sozzled]

I'm kind of sympathetic to the chorus of complaints about the hasslemails generated by the System - Joomla! Update Notification plugin. Since the release of J! 3.6.0 I, too, have received dozens of emails notifying me that the new release was available.

Not that I believe the myths, folklore and hearsay about J! 3.6.0 having problems or (as some people have claimed) that is breaks things because in my experience it hasn't. But the tales of woe that people have written in this forum about their problems are unnerving. After biting the bullet, taking the plunge and throwing myself into the task, I updated one test site and then another and another until finally I had updated a dozen or so old J! 3.5.1 sites without encountering a single problem. Even though the upgrade takes literally a few minutes, the task of upgrading took me several (nail-biting) hours.

It might be a better compromise if, instead of generating many emails (sometime two or three per day), the plugin generated them less frequently (say once a week) because, as we all know, many hobbyist site owners sometimes need more than just a gentle prod in the right direction to keep their software up-to-date. If this reminder system had been implemented years ago we wouldn't still be dealing with questions like "I've finally decided to migrate from J! 1.x: can someone please show me how to do it?"

Cheers.

[NickC4555]

Call me old school, but I wouldn't dream of upgrading a live site, so for me the one click upgrade button is just an invitation to blow your site up by not following process. There are very few Joomla sites that don't have one or more extensions, so even if you have faith that a Joomla upgrade is solid, there is no way you should put it straight into production without integration and regression testing in a dev/test environment.

With every new release the forum is full of posts with trashed sites and often no backups. It takes no more than half an hour to snapshot a site onto a subdomain, where it can be upgraded, tested and deployed back in an orderly way. And by testing, I mean following a test plan that rigorously executes every use case you can reasonably expect users to perform, not randomly clicking every button for 10 minutes. Upgrading a live site is not a proportionate response to the risk that is inevitably introduced to a project by new versions of software.

[Krki]

Not that I believe the myths, folklore and hearsay about J! 3.6.0 having problems or (as some people have claimed) that is breaks things because in my experience it hasn't.

Hi

I'm happy for you that you haven't experienced any problems with upgrade(s) but there are A LOT of us which had em.

For example upgrade to 3.6.0 from previous version brought a redirect bug where multilanguage websites under certain settings got non default language forced by default with inability to switch back to default language .

3.6.1 upgrade addressed this issue and brought even bigger session related bug where users hosted on servers with php lower than 5.6 couldn't log-in into both backend and frontend.

Expect 3.6.2 release very soon.

I also manage a lot of Joomla websites and I don't like recent "Look we have a upgrade" Emails.
Especially because email is by default sent to all Super Users.
IMHO It's more than enough to display message in backend, instead of sending emails.

Regards

[PatrickDoyle]

It is obvious that this recent update is an unmitigated disaster for developers. Dealing with hundreds of emails from Joomla and clients each day is painful.

So is dealing with a group of developers (Joomla that would be you) who obviously have never had multiple clients or they would never have created this "Frankenstein Update Plugin"...!

I have one word for Joomla developers this week - #@#$$%^%$##!!!