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End of Life: Joomla 1.5

updated 20 October 2026

Joomla 1.5 reached its end of life in September 2012: since then there have been no security updates and no bug fixes for it – for 14 years. The last version was Joomla 1.5.26 of 27 March 2012. Here you can read what Joomla 1.5 stood for and how a website on Joomla 1.5 gets to Joomla 6 today.

Series "Joomla end of life" · part 2 of 9 · All Joomla versions at a glance

Joomla 1.5 in figures

Released21 January 2008 (Joomla 1.5.0)
Last version1.5.26 of 27 March 2012
Versions in the series27 (1.5.0 to 1.5.26)
End of security updatesSeptember 2012
Supported for4 years and 8 months
SuccessorJoomla 2.5

Is your website still running on Joomla 1.5?

We check what can be taken over and bring your website to Joomla 6 – prepared on a copy, switched only after your approval. We name the effort after an inventory.

See Joomla update and migration

What Joomla 1.5 stood for

  • Rewritten from scratch: a framework of its own following the MVC principle, the foundation of all later versions.
  • UTF-8 throughout and language packs, also for languages written from right to left.
  • Template overrides: change the output without changing Joomla itself.
  • Mambots became plugins; a legacy mode kept many extensions for Joomla 1.0 running.

More in the post Review: Joomla 1.5.

What that means today

Anyone still running a website on Joomla 1.5 today has been running it without security updates for 14 years. Known holes are listed publicly in databases and are searched for on purpose.

On top of that comes PHP: Joomla was only built for PHP 7 from version 3.5, and PHP 5 has had no updates since 31 December 2018 (php.net). Hardly any host still offers such old PHP versions – after a change at the host, a website like this often shows nothing but an error 500.

The way to Joomla 6

There is no update in the backend from Joomla 1.5 – too many major versions lie in between. The way is a rebuild on Joomla 6 into which we take over your content: articles, categories and menus. We rebuild the look or renew it with you, and we redirect old addresses to the new ones so that Google and your visitors find you again.

We name the effort after an inventory, before we start – more on the page Joomla update and migration.

Sources: Joomla downloads (versions and dates), Joomla documentation, 1.5 version history, php.net (end of PHP versions).
Updated on 20 October 2026: dates checked against the official Joomla sources. The earlier version gave 1 January 2012 as the end-of-life date – according to Joomla, support ended in September 2012.

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Series

Joomla end of life

  1. Joomla 1.0 · ended since 22 July 2009
  2. Joomla 1.5 · ended since September 2012 (this post)
  3. Joomla 1.6 · ended since 19 August 2011
  4. Joomla 1.7 · ended since 24 February 2012
  5. Joomla 2.5 · ended since 31 December 2014
  6. Joomla 3.x · ended since 17 August 2023
  7. Joomla 4.x · ended since 14 October 2025
  8. Joomla 5.x · security updates only until 12 October 2027
  9. Joomla 6.x · current until 16 October 2029

All versions at a glance: release, last version, end of support

Ufuk Avcu

Owner and developer of the Joomla Agency. Has been building and looking after Joomla websites since 2009.

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