Support

All your questions can be answered by reading our April 2015 article on PHP version support.

So, based on PHP's official version support chart and our 9 to 12 months of post-End-of-Life support for PHP versions we have the following PHP version support cutoff dates:

• PHP 5.5 supported until sometime between 21 May 2017 and 21 July 2017
• PHP 5.6 supported until sometime between 31 October 2019 and 31 Dec 2019.
• PHP 7.0 supported until sometime between 3 October 2019 and 3 Dec 2019.

However! PHP support is just half of the question you should be posing. The other half of the question is "will my version of Joomla run on my ancient LTS release from back when the dinosaurs roamed the earth". The answer is "most definitely NOT". Joomla 4 will have a minimum requirement for PHP 5.6 or 7.0. This means that we will never support PHP 5.5 for Joomla! 4.

This, in turn, poses another question. How long do we support a Joomla! release after it goes end of life? The answer is 1 month. There are two exceptions:

• Last release in a major branch (1.5, 2.5, 3.7 or whatever comes before 4.0): 6 months of support after they become end of life. Usually that's 12-18 months after the next major version becomes available, giving you ample time to upgrade.
• Special cases (Joomla! 3.2). Joomla! 3.3 only supported PHP 5.3.10 and later for security reasons, whereas Joomla! 3.2 also supported PHP 5.3.3 to 5.3.9. We had extended support for Joomla! 3.2 to 6 months to help people migrate their sites.

The corollary to that is that Joomla support may impact PHP version support. This has not happened in the last 10 years, therefore it is a merely theoretical possibility. For example, if Joomla! 4 is released in 1 June 2017 and Joomla! 3 becomes end of life on the same day we will drop Joomla 3 support on 1 December 2017. Assuming that Joomla! 4 has a minimum PHP requirement of PHP 7.0, on 1 December 2017 we only support Joomla platforms which run on PHP 7.0 and later. This would mean that we would have to discontinue support for PHP 5.6 two years earlier than expected as it would be impossible to run our software on the old PHP version. Usually this is not a problem because Joomla tends to have a longer major version release cycle than our software.

Moreover, there's something to be said about what no longer supporting a PHP version means. You will still have the option to download and use older versions of our software which are compatible with the PHP version you are using, per the Compatibility page. However, we will not fix any issues with these old versions, including interoperability with remote storage engines.

All that said, I strongly disagree with you that running an LTS release is a good idea. As I've written in the Compatibility page:

We strongly recommend using PHP 5.6 or 7.0. We may drop support for earlier, end of life, versions of PHP without prior notice at any time. Any PHP version older than a couple of months can be assumed out of date and vulnerable to security flaws even if your Linux distribution claims to backport security fixes because they will only backport those marked as high impact, not all security fixes.

Further to that, old versions of PHP have really silly bugs which require us to write workarounds. The workarounds slow down the backup process and create a massive amount of technical debt. After a while we reach the point where we simply have to drop support for old versions otherwise our software will no longer run with modern PHP versions. For example, mcrypt (used for JPS archives and settings encryptions) is dropped in PHP 7.1. It can be replaced with the OpenSSL extensions which, while theoretically available since PHP 5.3.3, was not installed or even available in most LTS releases as it was not part of the official PHP package. So even if we hadn't decided to drop PHP 5.3 support we'd have to.

Finally, you must note that it is completely suicidal running your site on the old and very slow PHP 5.3. Just by upgrading to PHP 5.6 you will make your site anywhere between 2x and 3x faster. This has a profound effect on search engine placement. By insisting to run an obsolete PHP version not only you are needlessly subjecting yourself to security and functional issues fixed years ago but you are actively degrading your search engine placement, making your site invisible to your clients. Why would someone insist to do that is beyond me. Ultimately, it's up to you to take a responsible stance against your sites and most importantly your clients's site. Don't burry them because of your misguided and ill-informed choices. Older IS NOT better.

You are happy with Ubuntu doing this:

They fix on the latest release of PHP and maintain that with security patches across the 5 years.

But you demand Akeeba does this:

We need a support cycle from akeeba that takes this into account the release cycles of hosting platforms. I'm not asking for new features on older sites, just bugfixes.

What you expect Ubuntu to do is provide you with security patches for five years. You are very happy that they only provide security patches but not any bug fix whatosever.

You expect Akeeba to provide security patches and bug fixes for five years. You are very unhappy that we only provide security patches but not any bug fix whatosever.

That's insane.

We actually do much better than Ubuntu when it comes to security patches. We take security very seriously. We DO provide security updates for unsupported versions as you can read in our Compatibility page. We even provide the security patches for Professional releases to people who do not have a current subscription.

We do try to provide security patches for as back as humanly possible. After careful consideration we decided in July 2016 to stop providing security patches for sites based on Joomla! 1.5 and PHP 5.2 or earlier. It's been around 5 years since either platform received updates, meaning their market share is next to zero and not worth our time.

Please note that we will not provide any non security related bug fixes for unsupported releases. This is exactly what Ubuntu does with their LTS versions: they backport security fixes, they do not fix bugs. This is exactly why I told you that running old software is bad: unfixed bugs.

This ticket is closed.