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Joomla 1.5 Bugs

ByGarf

Editor’s note: We became so sick and tired of Joomla’s bugs and upgrade issues that we eventually dumped it altogether in 2018, in favour of WordPress. It actually took less time to move to WordPress than it did to perform yet another Joomla upgrade “migration”.

Upgrading from Joomla 1.0 to version 1.5 must be one of the most depressing and frustrating tasks a web developer can undertake. And believe me, it’s up against some stiff competition in this context.  Have already spent almost a week converting just one Joomla 1.0 instance to version 1.5. I’m a big Joomla fan but I’m sorry to say that wading through the multitude of Joomla 1.5 bugs, omissions and poor documentation has proven a very depressing and frustrating exercise – especially considering we have several more Joomla instances to convert.

TBH, we are starting to wonder whether we should spend the time moving to another CMS instead. You see, I’m even more concerned by the large number of bugs in Joomla 1.5, especially considering that users are effectively being forced to upgrade now 1.0 is reached its end of life. But I have been able to deal with or work around (or simply do without) most of these issues.

  1. Smilies generated in old version not working
  2. PDF generator crashes when processing articles with PNG’s
  3. Old SEF urls broken (this is a real nuisance – and the live_site variable issue means I cannot even deploy any of the proposed workarounds)
  4. Layout broken in Category Table view due to an error in the code.
  5. Unable to hide the “#” column in Category table view.

…to name but a few!

Basically we have several Joomla instances behind reverse proxies. I have spent almost a week converting GarfNet’s Joomla 1.0 instance to version 1.5. I was amazed how many things didn’t work following upgrade and how little authoritative documentation there is to assist in the process. However Joomla’s failure to observe “live_site variable” issue is a real deal-breaker as far as we are concerned because so many features are broken because of it.

  1. Users are unable to create, edit or save articles (although admin can still do so from the administration area).By “unable to edit” I mean that clicking the “edit” icon opens the edit dialog. One can attempt to make changes in the editing dialog (TinyMCE rich text editor or plain text). But when one presses “save”, the changes are not recorded.
  2. Column Sorting and and Title Filters in “category table” view don’t work. Please see:-
    http://www.garfnet.org.uk/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&id=19&Itemid=58
  3. RSS feeds from our site show wrong link URL’s:-
    http://www.garfnet.org.uk/joomla/index.php?format=feed&type=rss

When the user tries to use any of the above mentioned functions, the browser hangs around for several minutes, with the ISP’s internal IP address displayed the browser’s status bar. Eventually the browser returns a “page not found” “Network timed out” error and the ISP’s internal IP address (rather than our domain name) appears at the beginning of the the url in the address bar.

Sadly7, Joomla 1.5 is a trainwreck, made worse by the fact that happy v1.0.x users are being forced to upgrade whether they want to or not. This is because support for 1.0.x is discontinued 2009-07-22. I was a big Joomla fan and have the greatest respect for its developers and I understand the pressures they are under. However, I don’t understand why version 1.0.x is being discontinued and support for it withdrawn, when its replacement still has so many unresolved bugs?