April 2014 – Joomla!® numbers

Where are we? The Joomla!® 2.5.x version was the most popular compared to previous versions, surpassing version 1.5.x by more than 13%. This is still a positive fact as official support for version 1.5.26 ended last April 2012 and it is therefore no longer recommended to install this version.

Following closely behind in low percentages were versions 1.6.x, 1.7.x and 3.x

Joomla! version usage data - December 2013 The latest research carried out by JoomlaHost.it is from these days and has highlighted results that deserve reflection and which we will analyze below.

We took around 30 thousand sites as a sample and noted, compared to the latest published statistics, some important variations shown in the graph below:

Joomla version usage data - April 2014 The data extracted is encouraging: compared to the last survey, the percentage of users using versions 1.5.

In addition to the positive notes, we point out a countertrend. The research highlighted the presence of versions 1.0, 1.6 and 1.7, albeit in a minimal percentage, versions not detected last December 2013.

The use of versions 1.0, 1.6 and 1.7 is highly discouraged as they contain known security flaws and exploiting the vulnerabilities of an outdated Joomla!® site is relatively simple, paradoxically the instructions are easily found online.

JoomlaHost.it intends for its users to maintain all versions of the CMS, without any forced migration operations, allowing planning for subsequent versions in complete tranquility.

We recommend that anyone using versions such as 1.0-1.5.x-1.6-1.7 and production sites plan to migrate to the soon-to-be available version 3.3 (STS short term support), which should then move to version 3.5 (LTS long term support) this fall.

We remind you that we will have updates for the current version 2.5.x until the end of 2014, after which support will be discontinued and no more updates will be released, not even due to security flaws.

Before each migration, we advise you to check that the templates and components are compatible with the new installation and to perform a preventive data backup so that you can immediately restore the website contents in case the operation fails.

In the hope of seeing a percentage increasingly closer to zero for versions 1.0, 1.6 and 1.7 and an increasingly narrow gap between the popular version 1.5.26 and the most recent 2.5.x, we'll meet you in about 3 months for a new statistics and analysis on the versions of Joomla!® installed by our users.