Hi all, I’m happy to announce that I’ve released the final version of the update manager. I would kindly ask all those who downloaded and installed the beta versions to update to the final release going forwards. There is a small introduction with links to the latest release on my open source consulting site as well as a walkthrough of the process. This is the first stand alone release of the tool from the Advanced Tools package and I’m going to update the Advanced Tools package to incorporate this update sometime tomorrow. I’ve also applied to have this extension listed in its own right on the JED as well to make it even easier to find. Check it out and as always if you have any issues, let me know through the comments.

For those who had earlier versions of the extension installed, you will probably be getting the following message (or have issues updating to 1.5.12): Parsing XML Document Failed: Not a JUpgrader definition file!

Updating to this version of the update manager will resolve those issues, so what are you waiting for? Update!

As I edge closer to a release I have what I hope will be the close to final. So far I have one outstanding issue with parsing XML files which I hope to have resolved with an alteration of the XML file. So you can download the Joomla! Update Manager 1.5.1 Beta 3 which now has displays for issues where your temporary path might be wrong (unfortunately it isn’t easy to handle detecting if something is writeable when in FTP mode so when I work that problem out things will be solved). As always, comments welcome!

Some more updates and fixes including a message display system, the ability to force upgrade a site with a full patch and some minor bug fixes. Again, this release requires PHP5.

Download Joomla! Update Manager_1.5.1b2

If you have any issues, feel free to submit comments. So far I have one outstanding issue with some sites with FTP enabled not downloading files properly – I think it is a permissions issue but I’m still investigating this.

I’ve done a major update to the update manager that is distributed with the Advanced Tools pack. I’ve also released it as an individual download as well that you can get and update your Advanced Tools install or just install individually if you want. However the side effect of this is that I’ve killed the old version. It was a hard decision because at one stage I was going to have a new file location and have the old software work going forwards as well as the new software working fine. I thought I’d force the update though to bring things forward. But its a big change.

First if you’re on the old version, you will get the following error message:

Parsing XML Document Failed: Not a JUpgrader definition file!

Complete with a shiny red font and the like as well. Once you’re at that point you aren’t going to be able to continue with the old tool. It has reached the end of its era. The tool itself is a slight modification of the 1.0 version that I wrote a few years ago – so I guess its fitting that it gets a bit of a rethink into a new 1.5 like version with features backported from 1.6’s tree. Part of this means that I’m really only supporting PHP5 or greater any more. I don’t have PHP4 handy for me to test any more and really, its getting beyond a joke now. Joomla! 1.6 will require PHP5.2+, however most of what I’m working on should work fine with PHP5+ without issues.

So what features do we have:

1. The ability to update the updater itself? Check!
2. The ability to switch between the 1.5 extractor, a backported 1.6 extractor and 1.5’s built-in PEAR Archive_Tar? Check!
3. The ability to manually upload files and use those instead of requiring an internet connection? Check!
4. The ability to specify a HTTP proxy to download updates through? Check!
5. Support for fopen and cURL for downloads? Check!
6. Support for working with FTP mode as well as without? Check!

I’ve got a beta release that if anyone is interested in testing ready to go, just download the “Joomla! Update Manager 1.5.1 Beta” by clicking the link (or copying it) and installing it into your own site. It’ll work for new installs or update existing installs.

Let me know if there are any issues as comments here. Once I’ve finalised this release, I’ll switch over the paths from update2.xml to update.xml and get everything squared away all nice and tight.

Progressing forward with my releases, Ban IP Address and Range has just received an update to allow it to redirect to a location instead of just displaying a message. This means you can redirect to a static page somewhere with more details, an image or something similar like that.

As always you can check it out on the Joomla! Extensions Site and there is some documentation online as well (needs to be updated still though!). Downloads available from JoomlaCode.

Today i released an update for my migrator extension to 1.5 due to a fix to a subtle bug that I introduced with the configurable batch sizes that I introduced in Migrator 1.3 release. This is would cause weird SQL duplication for tasks that were suspended due to the timeout avoidance code. The change was pretty sime, a but of code that I had forgotten to update when I was doing some other changes. Next on the release list for tomorrow is an update to the ban IP address or range extension.

You can download Migrator 1.5 from: http://joomlacode.org/gf/download/frsrelease/10646/41924/migrator.zip

When I went through high school we had three segments for our maths and physics exams: we had the basic knowledge part that tested if we new a given fact and could apply it to a straight forward problem, we had the understanding part that tested if we could understand a fact and apply it to a slightly more complex problem and we had a complex reasoning section of the exam which tested a combination of the items we knew and took a large number of steps to get to the final answer. Today I’m hunting around to look for file system permissions and I’ve read something that makes me wonder if there should be that distinction.

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I was sitting in Joomla! Bug Squad today chatting about browsers. Firefox 3.5 is almost ready (I’m typing on a release candidate with it, I’ve been using it since beta, I used 3.0 when it was still ‘Minefield’) and Safari 4 has been recently released (another one that I used throughout beta). Each offer improvements in speed over their predecessor which got me thinking about the progression of different browsers.

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It strikes me as annoying that some how prepaid phone users get treated as second class citizens. They historically don’t have access to half of the features that are offered to those on plans just because you own your phone outright. In addition Australia has locking of phone devices to networks as well and then have the hide to charge you $30 whilst someone presses a few buttons for a minute and hands you your phone back. This situation has thankfully steadily improved over the years and with the introduction of Vodafone in Australia it seems things are slowly getting better but not quite there. Read more

Today was an interesting day. The usual Friday things happened: I came in, read my email and responded to those that required it, we had our 15 minute daily team meeting and I had my half an hour (or so) meeting with my master’s supervisor about metadata filesystems. Of course the usual occurs with work progressing. Today’s work is UniHIRTS again and I think I’m at the point where I’m happy enough with it. I’ve gone through and wiped out a few of the simpler tasks that I could handle with a few remaining tickets that are nice to haves. I’ve done a bit of a reskin and unfortunately it doesn’t all look good in IE but it still looks tolerable.

But most interesting today I heard word from my old Council friends that they’ve finally gotten to ditching Novell. Whilst I was there a project called “Get Rid of Novell” and “Get Rid of Legacy” which seems to have been given a heightened priority since Novell decided to double the licensing cost of their software. Council now has 90 days in which to remove all Novell software. This should be interesting as they have a lot of Novell supplied software: SLES, SLED, the Netware servers, eDirectory and its client, Novell’s IDM product, iPrint and  Zenworks. One of the things that kept Novell software around was the fact that it was half the price of the Microsoft equivalent, however with this it appears that this isn’t going to be the case so one of the reasons for retaining Novell, cost, is gone. And whilst it is a great solution for a lot of problems, the software that is slowly being deployed within the organisation is increasingly dependent on Microsoft’s software: running on Windows, integrating with Active Directory and providing management tools that integrate into Microsoft’s management console tools. Should Novell had let them be at the original price for another year, they’d have the money instead of doubling the price and well ending up with nothing. But life moves on.