Support

The first thing I have to point out is that what you see is NOT Kickstart. People, please DO read the first page (popup) displayed by Kickstart every single time it runs. The restoration script is Akeeba Backup Installer, as demonstrated by its title in big, bold letters at the top of the page. Kickstart merely extracts the archive. Kickstart and Akeeba Backup Installer are as related to each other as flour and sugar. Yes, if you combine both you can make a cake. But is sugar some kind of flour? Not at all.

Why doesn't Akeeba Backup Installer work on anything lower than PHP 5.2.7? Because only PHP 5.2.7 and later is supported by our software. This has been the case for a very, very long time.

To put things in perspective. PHP 5.2 has been end of life since January 2011. That's less than two weeks sort of two years. End of life means obsolete. Not supported by its developers. Dead as a dodo. The last version was PHP 5.2.17. PHP 5.2.6 was released over 5 years ago. In computer terms that's ancient. Should you use a five year old version of PHP? Not unless you enjoy being hacked, when anything works at all. The earliest version of PHP we support is PHP 5.2.7, which is a little younger than 5 years old and has been dead for two years. Please, if you have a server with software older than that then it's more than two years overdue for an upgrade. FWIW, we will drop support for PHP 5.2 in 2013. Besides the obvious security implications of using an end of life release of PHP there are also technical issues. At some point continuing to support PHP 5.2 makes it impossible to maintain and evolve the software. Do yourself a favour. Don't use a server with ancient software.

Hi Appie,

Yes, you are right. These checks at the top are Joomla! checks except the PHP version check.  I had to choose between the following:

1. Joomla! 2.5 runs on PHP 5.2.4 or later
2. Akeeba Backup Installer runs on PHP 5.2.7 or later
3. Joomla! 3.0 runs on PHP 5.3.3 or later

I had to make a check which would be the best compromise. Since no restoration will happen if Akeeba Backup Installer doesn't run, I had to satisfy #2 (which also satisifies #1). If I chose to satisfy #3 then you wouldn't be able to restore J! 2.5 backups on servers compatible with ABI and J! 2.5. So I chose to check for PHP 5.2.7 or later. I could try to explain that in the documentation, but I thought that would be a little more confusing, isn't it?