When it comes to updates there’s often two thoughts I see

1. Any add-ons/extensions/mods are only compatible with specific versions. Known as it worked on 2.5, why doesn’t it work on 3.0.
2. Future versions try to maintain previous behavior and method signatures. Known as we require version 2.5 or newer.

With the announcement of Joomla 4 beta 1 I am once again thinking back to every previous major version upgrade and what that has meant. My first experience with this was when Joomla! 2.5 came out, which wasn’t an upgrade as much as a full blown migration. As luck would have it, Matware released jUpgrade which migrated content, menus, and related items to a new Joomla! 2.5 install. This was a life saver, and after using it once I made it part of my list when upgrading a site.

Now upon opening that new Joomla! 2.5 site, all your extensions now had to be installed, if a version for Joomla! 2.5 existed, and your templates (if they had just about any level of custom integration it seems) all had to be installed, after an update by the template provider to support Joomla! 2.5. This is what lead me to develop the very small BSC Article Footer, as I couldn’t find a replacement for a Joomla! 1.5 plugin so I decided I could write my own.

With Joomla! 3 the situation became a bit better, now you could upgrade from Joomla! 2.5 without a third party extension. Yet there was still some issues, so for this my list had the very critical step of disabling all extensions as I often got fatal PHP errors after most upgrades. Now it was disable all extensions -> upgrade Joomla! -> install updated extensions/templates -> re-enable each extension one by one to ensure none was missed. With this version I had some templates where they worked just as is, this was great. All custom extensions I had written did require some minor changes, as I now needed to use JControllerLegacy/JModelLegacy/JViewLegacy with a few other tweaks.

Now that Joomla 4 beta 1 is out, it now starts over again, only we know from the start that Joomla! 3.9, when released will have 2 years of support, which will give plenty of time for extensions to be updated.

While I can’t help but contrast this with WordPress’s situation, where I’ve often been able to use most extensions between updates, and with the use of a child themes, even keep the same theme thought an upgrade. Which is not without faults as talked about by WP Rocket in Backward Compatibility – Is It A Good Idea?

I was installing K2 2.6.8 on a Joomla! 3.3.6 site and as soon as it was installed I tried to access K2 using Components –> K2. First thing I saw was instead of K2 it said com_k2, second was as soon as I clicked on it I got a white screen.

From experience I knew the first thing to do was to turn Error Reporting to maximum and try again, this time I got errors about K2_JVERSION and DS not being defined in administrator/com_k2/k2.php.

The fix I ended up doing was adding the two lines around line 20, right above if(K2_JVERSION==’15’){:

define(‘K2_JVERSION’,30);
define(‘DS’,DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR);

Tried it again, this time I got an error about unable to find K2HelperHTML, so now around line 80 right above the line starting with K2HelperHTML::loadjQuery(… I added this line:

JLoader::register(‘K2HelperHTML’, JPATH_SITE.DS.’administrator’.DS.’components’.DS.’com_k2′.DS.’helpers’.DS.’html.php’);

Tried it yet again, this time I had an error about not being able to find the K2Table class in administrator/components/com_k2/tables/k2item.php. So right above line 13 that said class TableK2Item extends K2Table I added a temporary line since I though K2 wouldn’t work at all:

require_once(__DIR__.DS.’table.php’);

As soon as I did this K2 started to work and even more weirder is I was able to remove all those additions and K2 still loads.

Recently I’ve noticed the regular Adblock Plus hasn’t been blocking the video ads on YouTube anymore, so I started to search for a solution and one option was a Chrome extension called Adblock for Youtube. This worked fine under Ubuntu but it never did under Windows 8. So using Chrome’s Web Developer Tools I noticed in the console it was stating certain files from certain domains was blocked. So back on my Windows 8 computer I added two custom filters that so far seam to be working to block the video ads. I also had it block the picture ad that would appear on the right side. The filters I used are below and as of today (May 17, 2014) they seam to work for now. I might end up trying to improve this but the main credits goes to the people who made Adblock for Youtube, although I’m not sure why it didn’t work in this case.

*doubleclick.net*
pagead*.googlesyndication.com*
*google_ads.jpg
*.v.fwmrm.net/ad/