2.4 Stable

05 December 2009 Last updated on 16 January 2012

JoomlaPack 2.4 Stable is released. Major improvements in the backup engine.

JoomlaPack Developers is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the 2.4 Stable formal release of our accredited Joomla! site backup component. This release brings major improvements in the backup engine and delivers crucial bug fixes over the previous two beta releases. You can always download it following the links on our Downloads page. If you have any problems, suggestions, wishes or simply wish to contact the team members, you drop us a line on our support forum.

If you find this software useful, please consider donating a small amount using the donation buttons found on the left hand column of this site and on the component's Control Panel page. This gives us the incentive to keep on coding great software and keeping it Free, both as in speech and as in beer!

Important Changes

A new database dump engine is shipped with JoomlaPack, but not activated by deafult. The new engine is able to backup all database entities supported by MySQL 5, including: tables, views, stored procedures, stored functions, triggers. It is also able to correctly backup tables running on special MySQL engines, i.e. MEMORY, TEMPORARY, FEDERATED, etc. As far as we know, at the time of this writting even the official MySQL Administrator was unable to handle all those exceptions correctly. In order to use it, please go to the JoomlaPack Configuration page on each and every of your profiles, expand the Advanced pane and choose the "MySQL 5 optimized database dump engine" in the "Database dump engine" field. The embedded installers JPI3 and JPI4 have been updated to anticipate and handle all those entities and special table cases supported by the new engine.

Another change which will delight many of you is the permanent fix for the "corrupt ZIP files" problem. As long as you are running JoomlaPack on a PHP 5 enabled host with the "hash" extension (95% of PHP5 hosts) the JoomlaPack-generated ZIP files will be standards compliant and can be safely extracted by third party archiver utilities such as 7-Zip, WinZIP, WinRAR, Windows Compressed Folder wizard, etc. Of course, eXtract - part of our Native Tools - as well as Kickstart are able to handle those archives just fine.

We need your help

Help us help you, by submitting cool new ideas in our support forum. There is a dedicated section for feature requests. Ask for anything, even if you think it's nonsensical, ridiculous or not very useful. Remember that three years ago a reliable Joomla! backup solution written entirely in PHP, without requiring exec() privileges and able to work on slow servers was ludicrous. Then, JoomlaPack happened. Throw ideas around. We hear you and we try to implement them. You power Open Source, you power JoomlaPack!

Change log

This is a short list of changes over the last two beta releases, 2.4.b1 and 2.4.b2 respectively.

New or improved features

  • Kickstart's got "Minimum execution time per step" feature. Fixes compatibility bugs with mod_evasive, mod_security and other anti-DDoS security solutions.
  • Advanced Kickstart options are now configurable without having to edit kickstart.php
  • Show a warning about downloading backup files through the browser after clicking download button or link in Backup Administrator page
  • New database dump engine (mysql-new) better supports views, merge tables and foreign keys with table dependency resolution. Mysql-new database dump engine also supports procedures, functions and triggers.
  • Logging is not performed when the Control Panel resets the running CUBE instances
  • JPI4: Minimum script execution time, in order to avoid 403 errors on servers with mod_security, mod_evasive and other anti-DoS solutions
  • JPI4: Added Live Site parameter, 'cause some servers require livesite to be set, you know...
  • JPI4: Support for stored procedures, stored functions and triggers restoration
  • JPI3 supports stored procedures, stored functions, triggers and views

Bug fixes

  • Minimum execution time algorithms would calculate elapsed time in seconds instead of in milliseconds, potentially causing unnecessary delays and/or timeouts.
  • Non-Joomla! tables were not being backed up due to the algorithm mistakenly trying to assign them a prefix.
  • Yet another attempt at fighting empty site root. This time it seems to be working.
  • CRC32 calculations under PHP 5 using the hash extension were wrong (inverted order of bytes) due to oversight. After this fix, ZIP files should no longer be reported as corrupt when accessed by third party archive extraction software.
  • Site's root wasn't obscured on log files produced on Windows systems
  • Windows detection would fail on PHP4 hosts leading to multiple problems with filters and the backup core
  • Kickstart (UnJPA): logic error could prevent archive extraction when the target path begins with a forward slash
  • Kickstart (UnZIP): logic error could prevent archive extraction when the target path begins with a forward slash
  • JoomlaPack would fail parsing INI files on PHP 5.1.0+ if parse_ini_file() was disabled
  • JPI4: Missing double quote wouldn't let changing SA password
  • JPI4 wouldn't keep the old Super Administrator password if the password field was left blank
  • JPI4 would change the Super Administrator password even if the password field deffered from the password confirmation field
  • JPI4: Fatal error in configuration.php was fixed: Call to a member function set() on a non-object (line 69)
  • JPI4: Would not work on systems where eval() was not permitted
  • JPI4: Would not work is configuration files had Windows line endings (\r\n)
  • JPI4: AJAX error thrown if databases.ini or any SQL file is unreadable
  • JPI4: Old db restoration error messages would still show through when you retried clicking on Next
  • JPI3: Deprecated ereg() wouldn't allow JPI3 to run under PHP 5.3.0
  • JPI3: Database restoration would fail because of innability to parse INI files on PHP 5.1.0+ if parse_ini_file() was disabled

Miscellaneous

  • Updated French back-end and JPI4 translation
  • Updated German translation
  • Added Russian translation
  • Updated Greek translation

On behalf of the JoomlaPack Project,

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Lead Developer and Project Leader