.htaccess and NginX Conf Maker: Better support for more file types in setting the expiration time. Even more static file types can now be cached browser-side.
.htaccess, NginX and WebConfig Maker: added option to reset all the options to default values. Did you mess up your .htaccess Maker, NginX Conf Maker or Web.config Maker settings? In the past you'd have to do database surgery which is hard, or re-run the quick setup wizard which resets all your settings. Neither option was particularly appealing. We have now added a reset button which will reset the settings for just the .htaccess Maker, NginX Conf Maker or Web.config Maker to the defaults so you can start with a clean slate, without affecting all your other Admin Tools settings.
Removed update notifications inside the component. In-component update notifications made sense in Joomla 1.5 to 3.1 inclusive, when live updates were either not supported (1.5) or didn't support commercial extensions (1.6 to 3.1). Starting with Joomla 3.2 there's support for updates of commercial extensions and we've been using ever since. The in-component notifications were simply mirroring the information received from Joomla and already displayed in its Control Panel page. No reason to do that anymore.
Improved unhandled PHP exception error page.
Using nullable DATETIME instead of zero dates. For historical reasons our software was following the Joomla convention of using the fake date “0000-00-00 00:00:00” as a placeholder meaning “no date”. MySQL 5.7 and later will, by default, not allow zeroes in the month or day part of the day unless explicitly told otherwise. While Joomla does explicitly tell MySQL to allow zeroes in dates, even in Joomla 4, this behavior is deprecated and might be removed in a future version of Joomla. We have now replaced these placeholder dates with a NULL value – a special value which MySQL and PHP understand to mean “a date has not been set yet”. All your database tables will be automatically converted upon upgrading our software or, if that fails, when you visit the Control Panel (main component) page. This means that the upgrade or first access to the Control Panel page may appear to take a bit longer than usual. That's normal and there's no reason to be alarmed. If you get a white page wait a minute and retry. On extremely big sites on very slow servers you may have to repeat that a few times. On the vast majority of sites you won't need to do that at all.
Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.
We only officially support using our software with the latest Joomla! release branch, 3.9. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of Joomla! for security reasons. Older versions of Joomla! have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites.
We offer limited support for Joomla 4.0 which is currently in Beta. Akeeba Backup will run on it, back it up and restore it just fine as of Joomla 4 Beta 3. Please note that since Joomla 4.0 is still in beta it may undergo potentially breaking changes between now and its final release. Joomla 4 specific issues are addressed when we are notified about them or observe them ourselves but they will not be treated as urgent until at least Joomla 4 Release Candidate 1 is released by the Joomla! project.
We only officially support using our software with PHP 7.1, 7.2, 7.3 or 7.4. We strongly advise you to run the latest available version of PHP on a branch currently maintained by the PHP project for security reasons. Older versions of PHP have known major security issues which are being actively exploited to hack sites and they have stopped receiving security updates, leaving you exposed to these issues.
At the time of this writing we have only done some preliminary PHP 8 compatibility testing for the backup engine, PHP 8 being in alpha. We expect to be able to fully support PHP 8 around 2-4 weeks after Joomla implements full PHP 8 compatibility. PHP 8 itself is scheduled for release on November 26th. Our prediction for full PHP 8 support is before the end of January 2021, as long as Joomla adds support for it by end December 2020.
Please note that earlier PHP versions including but not limited to PHP 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0 are no longer supported and our software no longer works on them.