Support

TL;DR: If you see updates for any version of FOF or FEF coming from us, please install them.

The much longer explanation follows.

We had set up an update site for FOF 3 since 2015. However, we had never populated it in a way that would result in an update on your sites. That was on purpose. Installing a new version of our software would update it.

On March 2nd two things happened. First, we published new versions of our software using FOF 4. As a result, updating our extensions would not update FOF 3 anymore; we use a new major version.

Second, we made a change in FOF 3 in accordance with the change Joomla made in its own, outdated, copy of FOF. Joomla framed that change as a security issue, even though it is actually not; it's leftover code that never runs, addressing potential security issues in PHP versions before 7.0. The problem remains that the Joomla project treats this as a security issue which would lead them to mark FOF 3 as vulnerable even though it's not. They could even retroactively mark all versions of our software released between May 2015 and February 2020 as vulnerable, even though they are actually not. This would be very problematic for our reputation, more so when we actually did nothing wrong there. So we decided to publish a final update for FOF 3, populating its dormant update site.

As to why FOF 3 has not been removed on installing the new versions, I explained that too. Some third party developers are using it improperly, without marking their extensions as dependent on it. As a result, if we try to remove it it will be removed even when these third party extensions are installed. Therefore we might break someone's site because a third party developer didn't follow our instructions. Therefore we are not trying to remove it.

Instead, we marked FOF 3 as deprecated and stopped maintaining it as of March 2nd, 2021. We announced it will become end of life on December 31st, 2021. At this point we will issue a final update which will remove FOF 3 from your sites. This is the same thing Adobe did with Flash. It's also the same thing we had done a long time ago with the Akeeba Lazy Scheduling plugin (plg_system_aklazy).

Further to that, we decided that instead of having to release updates to FOF 4 and FEF with our software, even for minor issues, we could just enable their update sites. To this end you'll see that FEF also has an update to 2.0.2 which addresses a cosmetic but very annoying bug with static media preload hints.