Few days ago the Joomla! project released Joomla! 2.5.28 which is effectively going to be the latest 2.5.x release until the declared End of Life (EOL) for Joomla! 2.5 on the 31 December 2014.

What does this mean for your Joomla! 2.5 website?

Somewhere back in 2005 the first website that I've ever build with Joomla had to be in Bulgarian. Back then Joomla was in version 1.0 and more or less websites that needed a language other than English were really hard to do. I remember downloading a hacked version that made joomla utf8 aware, so that one could properly encode Cyrillic in the DB... It was a real pain in....

Then few years later Joomla 1.5 came out and a lot of the problems that non-english speakers had when making websites were gone. Joomla was using utf8, it was possible for each extension to distribute an .ini file with the strings that needed translations (no more php files for that).

As Douglas Crockford puts it: “Javascript is the world’s most misunderstood language” . I think that in the Joomla universe this statement is 200% accurate. Most of the extension developers out there are good with PHP, but when it comes to javascript one wants to just find that snippet online, copy & paste it and forget about it - code quality here is not that important! And I say doh! It is important!

Joomla extensions are installed on 1000s of websites. But the thing is – users don’t install just 1 extension. They install a lot of them! Modules, plugins, and components – everything is thrown into the mix. And out of one small JS mess we get one big mess! Javascript is mixed with html, global variables are all over the place, there is no trace of modularity, no trace of good design patterns and it is just painful to watch. If you are lucky enough – your component will work and you won’t have to do any support, but as it happens most of the time – your extensions are not going to work because of other peoples copy and pasting!