Joomla! 3.8 upgrade horror stories

[jsparek]

Reading through a lot of the posts on this forum, it looks like there are a ton of issues with updating from Joomla! 3.7 to Joomla! 3.8. Was the Joomla! 3.8 release properly vetted?

It's really becoming very difficult for me to recommend to our users to update to Joomla! 3.8 because of all of these horror stories, despite Joomla! 3.8 being the only release that is "in life" at this time.

Have all of these upgrade issues been isolated down to any particular source? Outdated components? Outdated themes? Low PHP settings? (max_execution, memory_limits, etc).

I would really like to recommend to all of our hosting customers to upgrade to Joomla! 3.8 (3.8.1). But given the number of Joomla! scripts installed and the amount of upgrade problems I am seeing in this forum, I suspect the vast majority of these installations will break with the Joomla! 3.8 upgrade.

I hate to point out a direct competitor, but WordPress does not seem to have as many issues with their upgrade process. And if they do, and it's caused by a plugin or theme, you can just rename the plugin and theme directories to reset. Joomla! does not appear to have a similar facility.

Hoping for some clarity on how to go about recommending upgrading to Joomla! 3.8.

[wojsmol]

Hi

Have all of these upgrade issues been isolated down to any particular source? Outdated components? Outdated themes? Low PHP settings? (max_execution, memory_limits, etc).

You named almost all main resons. One that left is incompatible extensions.

[jsparek]

I suppose the question then becomes what components/extensions/themes are compatible with Joomla! 3.8?

It just seems like there are always issues upgrading Joomla! This may be why there are so many severely outdated and ancient versions of Joomla! still existing throughout the Internet - users were too afraid to upgrade because the upgrades always broke something.

[wojsmol]

If the extensioon or template uses API correctly then all is god. Because namespacing files was moved. If extension uses require_once then there is a problem.

[deleted user]

Under the hood, 3.8 was a resource heavy update because of the migration of our library classes to use PHP namespaces (which included renaming over 300 files). So servers with lower resource availability didn't take this update as well as other releases. Another issue that has come up somewhat frequently is trying to update from older releases (3.5 and older) and because of changes in different parts of the system over time (added security checks in 3.6, menu changes in 3.7 and 3. you can run into a condition where the code is running in an unstable state (code expects everything on 3.8 API, database is still on older version, things go boom). For that one though, it's an issue any application that runs updates in a way similar to us will run into, so it's not unique to Joomla.

Beyond those two hangups, a lot of the update issues have been directly related to extensions and the way they work with our core APIs (one template provider direct includes files versus using the API to load objects, several extension providers are doing things that overload the core classes and break when new features are added). And unfortunately that's pretty typical of any Joomla update, extensions cause sites to go offline because of the ways they do things and changes in the core platform cause those behaviors to break. As long as extensions are overloading the core APIs there isn't a way to get around that problem.

As for WP's updates not being as problematic, remember they have two update paths. One is the automatic updates which basically only pushes security updates and critical bug fixes to sites (any non .0 release). The other is "manual" updates which have a large bulk of their bug fixes and new features, and those are the releases that generally cause issues. Using their current versions, you aren't going to hear of as many update issues going from 4.8.1 to 4.8.2 because the number of changes are minimal (well, OK, this might be a bad example because a poorly implemented security fix broke a lot of extensions), whereas updating from 4.7.x to 4.8.x you're going to see/hear about more issues. Another thing about WP's system is they don't use many of the PHP language features that we do, part of the benefit to the way their system bootup sequence works is they force load "critical" components of their application API and therefore those services can't be overloaded wheras in Joomla aside from a couple dozen classes which are loaded before the first plugin event, everything in the system can be overloaded (document and layout renderers, module handlers, and the core MVC classes being some of the architecture that falls under this, and generally where problems lie in doing updates).

[jsparek]

I definitely agree with that Joomla! scripts should be kept up to date. Chances are that if someone was already running Joomla! 3.7.5 then the upgrade to Joomla! 3.8.0 would have gone smoother. I can understand that.

But sadly, in the real-world, that's just not the case. There are still quite a few Joomla! installations that are using version 3.x (even more that are using 2.x, 1.5, and 1.0, but those people tend to deserve what is coming to them).

Perhaps something needs to be to the upgrade process. If the installation is running 3.5.1 is the upgrade process doing sequential upgrades? Is it upgrading to the next version and then the next and the next, all the way up to Joomla! 3.8.1? Perhaps that might be a better way to do this upgrade if so much is changing from version to version.

I just know we have a lot of Joomla! 3.x scripts on all of our hosting servers. And I really want to encourage all of those clients to upgrade to Joomla! 3.8.1 and keep their Joomla! script up to date. But that's hard to do when so many are using 3.5 or older and I pretty much have to tell them: "attempting to upgrade to Joomla! 3.8.1 will probably break your website." They won't upgrade then. And then in a few years, when Joomla! 4 or Joomla! 5 is out, we'll be looking at Joomla! 3.x like we are Joomla! 1.0, 1.5 and 2.5 now.

One of the reasons Joomla! has (or might have) a poor reputation, is due to the large number of hackings and compromises that happen with the script. A vast majority of those are due to the script being out of date. That itself is not an issue caused by the Joomla! developers. But the lack of clear, understandable, and straight-forward upgrade path is what is causing many people to turn away from ever updating their Joomla! script, and thus creating more compromise and hacking points.

I don't really know what the solution is. People need to do a better job of keeping their Joomla! scripts up to date. But having facilities that better insure that can happen successfully would really help.

[wojsmol]

@jsparek When the site is updating from Joomla! 3. before 3.6.5 when update takes two steps:
1. Joomla! 3.x to Joomla! 3.6.5.
2. Joomla! 3.6.5 to Joomla 3.8.1.