Joomla update intervals

Recently I've been asked a lot about how regularly updates to Joomla are released. This is an important question in order to estimate the maintenance effort of a website. For larger projects with a reasonable budget, Joomla maintenance costs are quite moderate compared to other systems. For smaller websites that are updated infrequently and have less budget or expertise, update intervals play a crucial role. Even simple page updates can cost €200 or more. I would therefore like to present some statistics and the approximate maintenance costs.

Costs vary depending on the project and budget. When calculating update costs, we limit ourselves to Joomla updates and do not take any extensions into account. We assume a 15-page website with no additional functions. The server environment is also important; Problems can significantly increase update times. My experience shows that you shouldn't save money when choosing a web host, especially if the website is a central part of the company.

There are various update methods, although when calculating the costs we concentrate on the second variant, which represents 90% of our customers: backup of files and the database, update installation and functionality testing.

Example maintenance costs for different Joomla versions:

• Joomla 1.0 : 16 versions over 1256 days with an average update interval of 75 days. Annual time required for updates: approx. 5 hours.
• Joomla 1.5 : 27 versions over 1521 days with an average update interval of 56 days. Annual time required for updates: approx. 7 hours.
• Joomla 1.6, 1.7, 2.5 : 25 versions over 864 days with an average update interval of 35 days. Annual time required for updates: approx. 7 hours.

With each new major release of Joomla, the number of updates increased. While Joomla 1.0 required an update every two months on average, Joomla 3.x now requires an update almost every month. However, the update process has been simplified and accelerated with the introduction of the automatic update mechanism from Joomla 1.6.

Joomla 1.5 was supported for 50 months, the longest support period to date. Future versions will be supported for either 6 months (STS versions) or 24 months (LTS versions), meaning that no future version will reach the significance of Joomla 1.5 unless the update policy changes fundamentally.

Outlook: Joomla has undergone a turbulent development. One of the main problems is that the system is mature for end users, but the developers are dissatisfied with the underlying structure. This led to repeated changes in function names and the need to adapt extensions. There is also discussion of reintegrating the Joomla platform into the Joomla CMS and replacing it with the Joomla Framework.