Support

I know that I have to soon upgrade my host server but my problem is that I have a few older Joomla sites that won't work at all when I upgrade PHP.

Do you know why just this one site says

"

Outdated PHP version 5.3.29 detected

Akeeba Backup for WordPress requires PHP 5.4.0 or any later version to work.

We strongly urge you to update to PHP 5.5 or later. If unsure how to do this, please ask your host.

Version numbers don't make sense?

Security advice

Your version of PHP, 5.3.29, has reached the end of its life. You are strongly urged to upgrade to a current version, as using older versions may expose you to security vulnerabilities and bugs that have been fixed in more recent versions of PHP."



and the other says

"

You are using an obsolete PHP version
Your site is running on PHP 5.3.29 which has stopped receiving security updates since Thursday, 14 August 2014. Using this on a live site is dangerous: unpatched security issues can get your site hacked. Moreover, we will only support obsolete versions of PHP for nine months since their end-of-life date. Therefore we will discontinue support for your PHP version on Thursday, 14 May 2015. We strongly advise you to ask your host to upgrade your site to PHP 5.5 or later."



I am a huge Akeeba advocate and ask your help. I could live with the obsolete version warning until I upgrade PHP, but the Outdated PHP message seems to prevent me from even using it at my own risk.

Is there a way I can at least get a backup until I upgrade PHP? Perhaps an older version?

Thank you Jim Kemble

Jim,

Akeeba Backup for WordPress will work with any PHP version 5.3.4 or greater. You get the warning with PHP 5.3.x because support for that version will be dropped soon. It will still work.

Now, Akeeba Backup for Joomla! is a different animal. The most recent versions do require PHP 5.4 or higher. If you do not have that version of PHP, you will need to use an older version of the competent that still supported the version that you have installed.

Thanks for the quick reply. It seemed like a roadblock because all I saw was the notice and no other tabs, buttons, configuration, etc. I just figured it wasn't going to work. I deleted the plugin and will re-download and try again. What should I download? Please see my screen cast. http://screencast.com/t/pkzMiX3QEN

Jim,

The version of Akeeba Backup for Joomla! that you need depends on both the PHP version and the Joomla! version. You just said "older Joomla sites" so I can't give you an exact answer. You can look at this page: https://www.akeebabackup.com/compatibility.html to find the exact version that you need. The version numbers link to the download pages.

I'm sorry if I was unclear by talking about Joomla. I am only concerned about the WordPress sites that run on this server. I wonder which Akeeba for WordPress I should download.
Again, sorry that my Joomla reference clouded things up.
Jim

We'll get there! :-)

There appears to be some conflicting information here. The release notes for 1.5.2.b1 indicate that it requires PHP 5.3.4 or greater. That agrees with what Nicholas told me earlier.

The compatibility table (just below the Joomla! table in the link above) says that 1.5.2.b1 requires PHP 5.4 or higher.

Nicholas has gone offline (it is late in his corner of the world) so I can't ask him for clarification at the moment. Based on what he told me earlier, 1.5.2.b1 should work on PHP 5.3.29. If you need to back down to version 1.4.2, we can do that without too much trouble, just delete files in the Akeeba plugin folder and upload the files of the 1.4.2 version in the same place.