Joomla 3.10 is soon to be at its End of Life (EoL) stage and so all Joomla 3.10 sites are now warning administrators to migrate to Joomla 4 as soon as possible. In this article we'll quickly run you through the scope of that process so you can get started migrating or ask for help where needed. At The Joomla Expert, we have provided Joomla migration services since the very beginning of Joomla, from 1.0 through to today's Joomla 4 migration needs. 

Warning
Support ends on 17 August 2023 for Joomla 3.10. Migrate to Joomla 4 as soon as possible.

Do we really need to migrate our Joomla website?

The short answer is no - the Joomla 3 CMS is very stable and tends to degrade gracefully - i.e. when there is a failure it typically presents a message that tells us what the problem is. In fact, we even have some past clients still running Joomla 1.5 sites, the codebase for which has been EoL since January 1st 2012, and is still running 11 years later! That said, older versions of Joomla are slower and can be vulnerable to malware because no new security patches are to be released for these versions. The main reason we find people requesting Joomla 4 migrations are when their hosting company upgrade the PHP or MySQL version on the server, which causes PHP code deprecation to run and either display issues or make the software throw a server error. This is really the worst scenario, when your live site is no longer available. Which leads us to the long answer.

SSL or Secure Sockets Layer is a security standard for websites that encrypts data sent to and from a website. This means that if you are on a compromised or hacked network, the data you are sending and retrieving from the website cannot be seen, only the web address you are accessing can be seen. SSL has since been replaced with a stronger encryption protocol called TLS or Transport Layer Security but getting a certificate is still often referred to as buying an SSL certificate.

Having a security certificate in place has a number of great benefits. As the site owner you are helping to protect your visitors and the Internet more generally from malicious actors. Google and other major search providers prefer secure website and so will rank your site higher than competitor sites, all other things being equal. Lastly, browsers such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera will often display warnings to users where a site does not have a security certificate in place.

Are you seeing a warning message in your Joomla administrator panel? This is because the Joomla 3 major version has now entered its security only phase. After August 2023, no new patches will be released. Its time to plan a migration to Joomla 4 but you still have plenty of time. Even if you are reading this after August 2023, a Joomla 4 migration can be implemented so your Joomla site can be back on a stable, supported production version.

Warning
Joomla 3.10 has entered security only mode. Support ends 17 August 2023. Start planning to migrate to Joomla 4 today.

When changing Order Status in Virtuemart you may see an error vmError: updateStatusForOneOrder unknown virtuemart_order_id which is caused by a small bug in the Virtuemart 4.0.4 package. It will be patched in the next version but in the meantime here's how you fix this Virtuemart Error.

vmError: updateStatusForOneOrder unknown virtuemart_order_id

Before you start, always remember to backup - make sure you have a verified backup of your Joomla Virtuemart software