We get many calls nowadays where clients ask us whether Joomla 1.5 is still supported or not. We answer that Joomla 1.5 is no longer officially supported – in fact, the official support for Joomla 1.5, including LTS (LTS stands for Long Term Support) ceased back in September of 2012. STS (Standard Term Support) ceased 5 months earlier (back in April of 2005). In short – the Joomla development team will no longer write a single line of code to fix anything on Joomla 1.5. This means that the latest version is Joomla 1.5.26, and that past that point the Joomla administrator has to migrate the website to Joomla 2.5 (or higher).
Unfortunately, and as we already explained, Joomla 1.5.26 is no longer secure, and new exploits are being discovered periodically. We are nowadays getting 3-4 calls a day about hacked Joomla 1.5 websites (most of these websites are already upgraded to Joomla 1.5.26). The hacks vary from an .htaccess file that keeps being rewritten every 30 minutes or so (and redirecting to malicious websites), to the googlebot Joomla hack that displays different (obscene) content for Google’s indexing bot (which means that the site’s actual content will not be indexed – but rather the obscene content). Oh and lately, we are seeing new hacks on Joomla 1.5 websites where every single PHP file is injected with malicious code. And just today, we fixed a Joomla 1.5.26 website where all the JavaScript files where hacked. The types of hacks that we are seeing (especially on the 1.5.26 version of Joomla) is growing by the week!
But, all is not that dark and there’s always a silver lining! Joomla 1.5 is still unofficially supported by 3rd party companies such as itoctopus. In fact, at itoctopus, we intend to support Joomla 1.5 (even Joomla 1.0) websites for many years to come (many of our clients are still using Joomla 1.5). We joke sometimes and say that we will cease supporting Joomla 1.5 when there are no longer Joomla 1.5 websites on the Internet – which may or may not happen in a decade from now! You might think that a decade is a long time in our business – but trust us – it isn’t; we are still getting customers who are still running Mambo! (Mambo is Joomla’s predecessor, for those who don’t know).
So, if you need help on your Joomla 1.5 website (whatever its size) – any help – then rest assured that there’s still this Montreal company called itoctopus that still supports Joomla 1.5 and that will always be there for you! Just contact us and we’ll prove to you how reliable, friendly, knowledgeable, and professional (yet still affordable) we are!