The New Admincredible Dashboard

Here's how the new Admincredible dashboard looks. In this example, four sites need updates.

Each site now has an arrow next to it. Click the arrow and you see everything on that site that needs updates.

The image below shows that this site needs 3 extension updates. Here's what the dashboard is showing you for each extension:

• Show 5 entries / Search box: If you have a lot of extensions, you can drill down quickly to find a particular one.
• Name: This gives you the name of the extension and also an icon that shows if its a Component, a Plugin or something else.
• Installed: This is version you currently have
• Available: This is the new version that you can install
• Included: If you don''t want to update a particular extension, just click to change "Yes" to "No".
• Update Now: Click to update just this particular extension.

I mentioned in a previous blog post that we've created our own special, custom update manager.

This update manager means we can tell not only what extensions can be updated by Admincredible, but also which extensions need upates. This level of information is unique to Admincredible. If an extension has updates, but doesn't support the Joomla core, it will appear as in the image below. Click "Visit Admin" and you'll be taken to the site's administrator area where you can make the update.

Below you can see the Joomla core tab:

And below is the Extension tab. This tab allows you to easily see how many sites have a particular extension installed. For example, Podcast Manager is installed on 2 of our sites.

 

Thank you from the Admincredible team

Thanks to all of the Admincredible members who have helped us get to this point. We'd love to hear what you think about the new features.

 

If you're not an Admincredible user yet, please feel free to sign up here: http://app.admincredible.com and test the new dashboard.

Can you explain what Joomlaworks is doing with automatic updates? 

It's already on for quite some time for K2 which is our flagship extension. We recently added automatic updates for AllVideos and soon we're adding support to Simple Image Gallery, Disqus Comments for Joomla! and more.

Why did you decide to provide automatic updates for customers?

We want to make sure that customers sites work as well as possible. Automatic updates are a great way to send new features and bug fixes to customers.

Is it difficult to add and support automatic updates for your extensions?

The Joomla! documentation is inaccurate at the moment and it doesn't properly cover the latest releases of the CMS. So we had to dig into the Joomla! code to actually figure out the code required for the updates to work. Now that we've figured out everything, implementing the update system is very easy.

The system would definitely benefit from small improvements to be honest. For example, there could be an option for commercial/GPL extensions to notify a user's site, without revealing a download URL. We can actually do that now, but if the user accidentally clicks on the update button, the update will fail. We've already seen a few other devs do that and we plan on doing it for some of our commercial extensions as well.

Challenge #1: Authentication

We have a three step process to setup Admincredible:

In order get Admincredible to run, our users need to link their sites to Admincredible.com.

Hosting companies are paranoid. They have every reason to be: they face many threats and need to create many layers of security. However, each hosting company has it’s own security and they often trip up good guys as well as bad guys. We’ve spoken with at least 2 developers who quit developing their own software because of the problems they faced trying to successfully authenticate across many different hosting companies.

Our solution: We’ve created a new version of the Admincredible component with improved support for most major hosting companies. We’ve also added support for Joomla firewall extensions such as Admin Tools and RSFirewall, which commonly block authentication attempts. The new component is available now. 

Challenge #2: Joomla core updates

Joomla’s core update system is getting better, but it’s not perfect. This is a difficult challenge for the developers of any CMS. It took WordPress years to get their update system working smoothly, and Drupal is guaranteed not to have one at all before Drupal 9. The Joomla system will quite often time out or have errors, particularly on cheap hosting companies.

Our solution: We’ve worked on Joomla core updates with 100’s of members sites and have been able to solve a lot of common problems. We've identified fixes for many Joomla problems and can now get updates working on the vast majority of sites. 

Challenge #3: Extension and template updates

Perhaps our biggest challenge of all was (and still is) 3rd party extension and template companies.

Joomla developers handle automatic updates in a variety of ways:

1. Joomla’s automatic updater
2. Akeeba Live Update
3. The developers’ own, custom updater
4. No automatic updates at all

So, only some Joomla extensions actually use Joomla’s automatic updater. The other extensions have their own updaters or just don’t support automatic updates at all.

Our solution: We’ve developed our own way of identifying extensions and how they update. Admincredible users will be able to login and see, at a glance, which extensions can be updated:

And which extensions can not be updated:

This new feature is going live in the next few days.

Looking ahead

Our main focus going forward will be on challenge #3.

Admincredible currently supports a lot of extensions, but our task in the coming months will be to support even more. Here are some of the things on Admincredible’s to-do list:

• Add support for extensions with custom updaters (or persuade them to move to the Joomla core).
• Try and persuade all extension developers to support custom updates.
• Evangelize for better and more reliable ways for developers to provide updates.

Thank you to all our beta customers. Your patience and support has enabled us to face these challenges. We hope to repay you with the best update system that Joomla has ever had.

If you haven’t tried Admincredible yet, we think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised. Take a free trial today: https://app.admincredible.com/signup

How often do sites need updates?

Let's look at the raw numbers first:

• WordPress has 62 releases in 87 months between December 2005 and February 2013. That's an average of 42 days per release.
• Drupal 6 has 26 releases in 48 months and Drupal 7 has 15 releases in 25 months. That's an average of 51 days per release.
• Joomla 1.5 had 27 releases in 26 months, Joomla 2.5 had 20 releases in 25 months and Joomla 3 had 4 releases in 6 months. That's an average of 36 days per release.

Some notes: I tried to exclude duplicate releases. So I only counted one version whenever Drupal launched a security release and a bug-fix release at the the same time. I also removed a couple of Joomla versions, such as 1.6.6, which were designed only for a small sub-set of users.

How regularly are updates released?

I found that the regularity of releases varies widely with the software.

Note: with the graphs below, the blue area shows the updates and the red area is the trend line that I added.

WordPress releases have been remarkably consisten over time. We mentioned that WordPress release came every 1.4 months. They really have deviated very little from that schedule since 2006.

Drupal 7 in an interesting case and shows a lot of variation. It took 5 months after launch for the release of Drupal 7.1, but there have been 4 releases in the last 5 months.

Drupal 6, Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 2.5 all show a clear pattern. There were regular updates in the first year and then updates slowed rapidly over time as the versions became more stable.

With Drupal 6, there were 9 releases in 2008 but only 4 in 2012.

With Joomla 1.5, there were 9 releases in 2008 but only 4 in 2011 and 2012 combined.

With Joomla 2.5, there were 10 releases in 2011, but only 3 in the last 8 months.

So, how often do I need to update my site?

• WordPress users can expect to update every 42 days. Because this strong pattern has shown for 7 years, it's reasonable to predict that it will continue.
• Drupal users can expect to update every 51 days. Drupal 6 users can now expect relatively few updates, but Drupal 7 is harder to predict.
• Joomla users can expect to update every 36 days, although that number is increasing. Joomla 2.5 users can now expect relatively few updates, but Joomla 3 is harder to predict particularly given that it's been out for the shortest length of time amongst our examples.

Is this all there is to the story?

Simply, no.

On the one hand, it's now easy to understand why more than two-thirds of Joomla, WordPress and Drupal sites are out-of-date. Updating about every 6 weeks is hard for busy people.

On the other hand, the frequency of updates alone doesn't tell the whole story. I can think of least five important points that we didn't include in this blog, but which impact how hard it is to keep a site up-to-date.

We didn't talk about:

1. How often sites need to update their plugins / extensions / modules / templates / themes. Because sites vary on which and how many add-ons they have installed, I'm thinking this would be harder to calculate. If anyone has any good ideas on how this could be calculated accurately, I'd love to hear it.
2. How stable or buggy the releases were.
3. How easy the updates are to apply.
4. How easy it is to move between major versions such as Drupal 6 and 7 or Joomla 1.5 and 2.5.
5. How many of these releases were security releases (where quick updates were essential) and bug-fix releases (where users don't have to move so quickly).

We'll try to address some of those issues in future blog posts.

About Joomla 2.5.9

Joomla 2.5.9 contains about 20 different bug fixes and 1 low priority security fix.

Click here to read the full release announcement for 2.5.9.

About Joomla 3.0.3

Joomla 2.5.9 contains over 130 different bug fixes and 3 low priority security fixes.

2.5.9 also included two improvements to the way languages are handled:

• One improvement allows you to automatically add languages as you install Joomla.
• The other improvement takes a previous language change from 3.0.2 that had applied only to content and menus and makes it available to all core components. Essentially this language improvement allows you greater control over what is displayed when you switch languages. 

Click here to read the full release announcement for 3.0.3.

An interesting comparison between 2.5.9 and 3.0.3

The Joomla 2.5 series is the Long Term Support version of Joomla and has been out for about 2 years now.

The Joomla 3 series is the Short Term Support version of Joomla and has been out for about 4 months now.

What does that mean in reality? I think these two releases give a very practical demonstration of the difference:

• Joomla 2.5 had 22 bug fixes whereas Joomla 3 had 136.
• Joomla 3 added two new features and several more are lined up for future releases.

If you want a stable version with no changes, go with 2.5. If you want a cutting-edge version with the latest features, go with 3.

Click here to read the full K2 update announcement.