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Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 7.5.3 Stable

Released on: 2021-02-05 05:56 CST

What's new

Rewritten Backup on Update plugin for improved UX. Joomla 4 beta 7 uses Bootstrap 5 instead of 4. This marked the third time since Joomla 4 alpha 2 that the Joomla project made a massive CSS change in the backend template. Each time we had to rewrite the Backup on Update plugin to accomodate it. This got us thinking. What if instead of trying to show the backup on update status on every backend page we only did that where it matters most — the Joomla! Update interface — using system messages? This is what we did. The new code works great across Joomla 3 and 4 and provides a cleaner and clearer experience for the user. That's killing two birds with one stone!

Joomla 4 improvements. We applied necessary changes in our code to support Joomla 4 beta 7. Along with that came a few unexpected but welcome improvements. Labels in the tabbed interface elements are more legible. Custom selects are now rendered as native selects. Checkboxes are rendered as native chackboxes. Long lists and multiselect lists are back into using Chosen for easier item selection.

Notice about Microsoft Edge “Sleeping Tabs” feature. Microsoft Edge introduced a new feature called “Sleeping Tabs” which deactivates the JavaScript timers of background tabs after 5' to several hours (default: 2 hours). This may cause long backups running in background tabs to halt and never complete. We now warn you to either stay on the active tab or disable this feature — either globally or just for your own sites. This feature will appear with more aggressive time settings on Chrome very soon and is under consideration on Firefox.

Improved CHANGELOG layout in the Control Panel page. Astonishingly, the CHANGELOG rendering in the Control Panel page hadn't changed for the better part of a decade. It was still using a bitmap image and CSS to display different areas of it to render its iconography. We replaced it with labels rendered with simple CSS, making it easier on your browser's renderer.

Bugfix. Import from S3: you cannot select .jps files. Apparently few people use JPS archives and even fewer use Import from S3. It appears that you could never select JPS files stored in Amazon S3 using the Import from S3 feature. This isn't so much of a bug as a necesary feature never implemented. Oops.

Darker Dark Mode. Our Dark Mode was intentionally designed to be somewhat bright. This had two side-effects. On one hand it was brighter than the dark templates most people would use. Moreover, the contrast between the background and the text was inadequate for people with vision-related disabilities. Considering that Dark Mode is (also) an accessibility feature we addressed this concern.

Removed the recommended PHP version. This has been a source of confusion. The recommended PHP version was placed in the code manually when a new version was finalised, which would typically be two to three weeks before it's released. The previous version released in early January was finalised between around December 3rd, before PHP 7.3 entered its final ‘security fixes only’ support phase. This led to the discrepancy of our software warning you that PHP 7.3 is getting old in the tooth and needs to be upgraded but also saying that the recommended version if 7.3. Since the PHP version warning is time-based, using the official PHP supported versions timeline dates, we decided to remove the recommended versions altogether from these messages and replace them with a note in our Compatibility page that you should always use the latest version of a currently supported PHP branch which is marked as being in ‘active development’.

Unable to access the component on Joomla 4 when using the PDOMySQL database driver with Site Debug enabled. This is actually a bug in Joomla itself. A misguided change in Joomla's core database driver in 2018 tries to use a MySQL feature deprecated in MySQL 5.7 (released in 2015, the feature does nothing on it) and removed in MySQL 8.0 (throwing an error) regardless of the database driver version being used. The way this code is written will cause the database driver to crash when its connection is being recycled which is exactly what happens when using Akeeba Backup: Akeeba Backup needs to recycle the database connection so it can share it with Joomla, without trying to establish a secondary connection which is forbidden on many hosts. Since Joomla won't address the bug they introduced three years ago we are swiftly working around it. We are what you'd call “experts” in working around Joomla bugs…

Bug fixes and minor improvements. Please take a look at the CHANGELOG below.

Joomla and PHP versions supported

Please consult our Compatibility page to see which PHP and CMS versions are supported by each version of our software. This page is generated from the metadata attached to each version as it is released on our site.

Changelog

New features

  • Joomla 4: backup profile selection uses Choices.js for easier navigation among many backup profiles
  • Rewritten Backup on Update plugin for improved UX (gh-685)

Bug fixes

  • [HIGH] Import from S3: you cannot select .jps files
  • [LOW] Import from S3: invisible breadcrumbs in Dark Mode
  • [LOW] Recommended PHP version was shown as 7.3 instead of 7.4
  • [LOW] Unable to access the component on Joomla 4 when using the PDOMySQL database driver with Site Debug enabled, see https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/issues/32019
  • [MEDIUM] Frozen backups toggle wouldn't work on Joomla 4

Miscellaneous changes

  • Document Microsoft Edge “sleeping tabs” and workarounds for long-running backups in background browser tabs
  • Improved CHANGELOG layout in the Control Panel page
  • Internals: normalised use JVERSION conditionals
  • Releasing the previous version without changes, due to server and CDN issues which resulted in inconsistent updates