Every since Joomla 2.5 was released last week, customers have been asking us this question: “Is it worth it to upgrade to Joomla 2.5?” That’s a very legitimate question. Our answer to this question is always like this: “It’s worth it as there are some features that are in Joomla 2.5 that do not exist in previous categories, but what’s the rush?”
The thing is we don’t think it’s pressing for people to adopt Joomla 2.5, and we have 4 reasons why:
- Joomla 2.5 is very new (it’s only 9 days old at the time of writing this post) and it’s not tested very well by the community yet. It’s better to wait for more sites to have it installed and wait until all the bugs are fixed.
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Many extensions still don’t support Joomla 2.5, so you’ll have the latest Joomla version, but you won’t have any templates or extensions that are compatible with it, and it’ll be very hard and costly to migrate your templates and extensions to the latest version of Joomla.
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Joomla’s latest versions were a flop. Remember the 1.6 version and the 1.7 version? Not too many people adopted them and many bugs were reported. Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7 are both retired/to be retired before Joomla 1.5 is retired (Joomla 1.5 is by far the most stable Joomla version right now). It’s better to wait for a few months to see if Joomla 2.5 will be any different than the previous 2 versions or if it will share the same fate.
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The upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 is a painful, very painful process. Most likely in the future the Joomla people will develop a simpler process to do the upgrade.
Unfortunately, we think that Joomla didn’t do well with the latest Joomla releases (Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7), and that’s why at itoctopus, we don’t trust the latest version as of yet. We’ll have to wait a few months to see if there are stability/security/compatibility issues with this version. Until then, we suggest you remain with whatever version of Joomla you currently have installed. From the experience we have from working on many Joomla websites throughout the years, we can safely say that Joomla 1.5 is by far the most stable. Joomla 1.6 is the worst, followed by Joomla 1.7. We are currently neutral on Joomla 2.5, but that neutrality might change to either a positive or a negative opinion in the future (we hope it’ll be positive).
If you really want to upgrade to Joomla 2.5 then we can help you do this. Just contact us and we’ll be very happy to serve you! (We’re the friendliest Joomla experts out there!)
When someone will decide that he like to upgrade, the next question is whether or not you should simply rebuild the website from scratch or try and migrate all the content from his current version to 2.5. Of course there is not easy answer for this either.