Regular users of Joomla! will have got used to patching their installation with FTP or on the command line. You may not be aware but the new versions of Joomla!, 1.6 and beyond, have built in updating. Here’s a very quick guide to updating Joomla! 1.6 yourself.
1. Login to your Joomla! administrator area ( www.domainname.com/administrator/ )
2. Go to Extensions > Extension Manager > And click on “Update”
3. Click on “Find Updates” in the top right and Joomla will automatically find any potential updates available to you.
4. If you see that Joomla is now listed, you should check the box next to “Joomla” and click “Update”.
5. Joomla will automatically update you to the latest version.
Notes: Joomla does not check automatically – administrators need to run the check from the control panel.
The “Find Updates” button is in the top right – the menu area that’s hardly ever used in Joomla and often missed.
With Joomla 1.7 about to be released, developers are wondering how many more updates of 1.6 there will be.
2020Media will be very happy to advise and help with any software update including making complete backups for you.
More information on our Joomla hosting can be found at www.2020media.com/joomla.
As reported around the web, the size of the download file for Joomla 1.6.3 update is causing problems for people using the web update. For some reason, the complete 8MB Joomla package is downloaded.
They are seeing timeouts and memory limits. Some have even reported that all their files have been deleted!
The workaround is to go back to the tried and tested FTP/Unzip method. We recommend downloading the 24KB patch instead of the entire Joomla package which comprises just 12 files.