The time has come: Joomla 2.5 official support will come to an end. On December 31st 2014.
Joomla 2.5 will reach its official End-Of-Life and will be officially deprecated.
This could have serious and detrimental effects to your current Joomla websites future.
Joomla 2.5 was released on January 20th 2011.and has been with us now for almost 4 years.
In 2012, Joomla 3 was released with enhancements and many new features. Joomla 3.X.X has become stable and a more friendly and usable system. The day has come and has been known for quite some time already for you to seriously consider the upgrading of your website.
The Meaning of End-Of-Life
After December 31st 2014, Joomla will stop all development of Joomla 2.5. Joomla development and security enhancements will focus on Joomla 3 only and Joomla 2.5 is officially obsolete. If a Joomla 2.5 security issue occurs after that, there may or may not be a security fix. If a Joomla 2.5 framework issue is found, there will be no fix at all - it is unsupported. This could leave your Joomla 2.5 website completely vulnerable unless you take extraordinary steps to secure it.
Running a Joomla site on an unsupported Joomla version might sounds doable: If no issue occurs, everything runs fine. You are completely right: If nothing happens, nothing happens. However, you probably also run a backup of the website. Why would you do that? Most likely to prepare for disaster. Having no backup of your site is similar to running an unsupported Joomla version: When nothing happens, everything is fine. However, when a disaster strikes, you might need that backup very badly. Similarly, when Joomla crashes for some reason, there might not be a Joomla 2.5 fix anymore, and you might need to upgrade in a rush. And when you are in rush, more things might go wrong.
Staying up to date with Joomla is about insurance. Using SITESASSURE to secure your vulnerable website is also about insurance.
Should You Upgrade to Joomla 3.X.X?
Yes. Period. If you are unsure about what this upgrade lead to, simply setup a testing site and use that testing site to see how the upgrade goes. If you do not know how to upgrade or have a complicated website, you will need help.
Upgrade Scenario #1
Keep your current joomla 2.5 version and add SITESASSURE SECURITY SUITE to try to protect its vulnerabilities. Without SITESASSURE you run a major risk of being hacked
Upgrade Scenario #2
Try the one click upgrade and if all goes well, your website is upgraded and not at risk. We wish you luck with this one
Upgrade Scenario #3
Click the one click upgrade button and your website is completely destroyed as components and plugins are not compatible with Joomla 3.x.x. Even your template could crash as that needs to be updated individually also.And dont forget, your customizations will need to be recoded again.
Upgrade Scenario #4
Your hosting companies server is udated and the server software, Apache, mySQL and or PHP version is not compatible and your website will not run.
For any of these scenarios, the upgrading time can be considerable and result in your site being down and offline for quite some time.
So really you have two options
1) Upgrade now and prevent issues and downtime later
2) Take your best efforts to secure your website with SITESASSURE and hope nothing happens. As long as your server environment does not change, we should be able to restore your website if it is hacked. SITESASSURE is 90% effective in keeping your website safe and secure.
Compare our security service to the other popular service
Sitelock $99.00 per month plus the cost if malware removal
Sitesassure. $25.00 per month and malware removal is included.
