Akeeba Backup 3.0.rc1

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Akeeba Backup Core 3.0.rc1 and Akeeba Backup Professional 3.0.rc1. This version addresses several operational bugs on both editions which could result in the CRON script's failure (Pro version) and other backup-time artifacts. You can download Akeeba Backup Core for free in our download section. If you are not an English speaker, you may want to take a look at the translations as well. If you get stuck, you're welcome to post to our Free Support Forum (a free user registration is, of course, required to post to the forum).

We are also extremely proud to announce that Akeeba Backup is the first extension to be Joomla! 1.6 ready! If you haven't been living under a rock, you already know that Joomla! 1.6 Beta 1 - the first solid sample of the future code base - was released amongst a press blitz and a torrent of mixed feeling posts. We strongly support Joomla! 1.6 and we decided to put our code where our mouth is. If you want to help bring Joomla! 1.6 stable to life, read my "An Urgent Call To Community Action" blog post on the All Together, As A Whole web site and join dozens of developers and other Joomla! fans in our community initiative.

Finally, we'd like to note that Kickstart 3.0 Release Canidate 1 is also released today. The new version of Kickstart sports a new interface and a rewritten extraction engine which outperforms the one on the 2.x branch. It is available from the Kickstart release page.

Have you seen our documentation yet? If not, take the time to read it on-line, or download the documentation ZIP archive which contains a high-quality PDF file for off-line viewing or printing. Please, save trees; do not print the User's Guide.If you are a subscriber to the Akeeba Backup Professional edition, you can download the update through the My Downloads section after logging in. If you are not a subscriber yet, you may want to find out more about it and become one. This way you'll also be helping us raise the necessary funds to continue the development of this software.

Changelog

This is the short list of changes since Akeeba Backup 3.0.b2:

New features

• Joomla! 1.6 compatibility
• Tables with a prefix of akb_ are automatically skipped as they would cause restoration errors
• Option to control how many table rows are fetched, useful if you have lots of huge rows which cause memory exhaustion issues
• Detailed report of the error instead of the cryptic "AJAX loading error: error"
• PHP4 killswitch for the component. If PHP 4 is detected, Akeeba Backup refuses to even load.
• Kickstart 3 automation
• Kickstart 3 (part of) documentation
• Option to enable the FTP layer during the integrated restoration

Changes

• Added full copy of the GPL text in the distribution
• ABI: Button click area includes the arrows as well
• ABI: Changed all requests to use GET instead of POST (some server may throw 406 if the browser doesn't set the Content-length properly when POST'ing)

Bug fixes

• Extensions filters SQL commands would include akb_ instead of the real db table prefix in db only backup mode
• VM product review table misidentified as view
• Potential Amazon S3 failure on systems with magic_quotes_runtime
• Default S3 ACLs were too tight and wouldn't allow the bucket owner read files written by other authorized users
• Tables with "view" as part of their name would be identified as VIEWs
• Infinite loop in table dependency scanning when tables with a prefix of akb_ were present in the database
• Use of multiple simultaneous db connections in the back-end backup would cause backup failure on some hosts
• Infinite loop on post processing failure
• Warnings happening in the finalization step were not shown in the back-end backup mode
• MultiDB test connection would not report a connection error if the database was missing
• Integrated restoration wasn't working
• Bugs in integrated restoration's language strings
• Step break before updating stats table in the finalization step to work around MySQL timeout issues on certain hosts
• Disconnection of db after the db dump step in native CRON mode to avoid MySQL connection timeout.
• Activating mod_akadmin on PHP4 hosts would lock you out of administrator. PHP4 is now detected and mod_akadmin aborts itself.
• Integrated restoration not working properly