Upgrade to Joomla 1.5.9 from 1.5.8
I kept putting off upgrading from Joomla 1.5.8 because I was dreading the possibility that something might go wrong. Plus, I had heard that Joomla 1.5.9 slows down websites considerably.
But after seeing which pages my stalkers have been trying to access, I figured it was only a matter of time before one of them figured out how to take advantage of the Directory Traversal exploit in Joomla 1.5.8. so I said, let’s just do it.
Gosh, it turned out to be so easy!!! The actual upgrade took about two minutes!
What takes longer though is the preparation before the actual upgrade. For your peace of mind, create a backup of your files and of your database.
It took an hour to FTP a copy of my website’s Joomla files to my desktop. Then I had GoDaddy back-up my database, which took another hour.
JOOMLA UPGRADE FROM 1.5.8 TO 1.5.9
Downloaded “1.5.8 to 1.5.9 Upgrade Package” from the official Joomla download page. It’s a ZIP file.
I opened it up and used FireFTP in Firefox to transfer the upgrade files from my desktop to my host’s server. Took just two minutes!
(NOTE: I was on a Mac when I did this, and when prompted by FireFTP about whether I wanted to overwrite the old files, I chose Yes to All. Other people reported having a hard time doing a Joomla upgrade on a Mac in terms of how and which of the old files are overwritten. Maybe I was lucky in my ignorance. The advice from others seems to be: if you can do it on Windows, do it there…)
Braced myself as I accessed my site’s front-end. All looked well as I tested the links.
Logged in the back-end and saw Version 1.5.9 in the upper-right corner. Super!
Performance-wise, I haven’t noticed a considerable drop in speed on my optimized site. But my other sites where I never fiddled with Gzip compression and the different cache settings, they seem to have gotten slightly slower after the upgrade — but nothing substantial enough to make me regret backing up.
Just to relieve the stress of constantly worrying about your Joomla website being infiltrated by low-lifes, upgrade to Joomla 1.5.9. If perchance something does go wrong, simply replace the upgrade files with your old 1.5.8 files, which you have a backup of!
