Upgrade to Joomla 1.5.10 on GoDaddy
Back in March, I received an email from JSST (Joomla’s Security Strike Team) with this announcement:
- Exploit type: XSS
- Reported Date: 2009-March-12
- Fixed Date: 2009-March-27
Description: XSS vulnerability exists in the category view of com_content.
Affected Installs: All 1.5.x installs prior to and including 1.5.9 are affected.
Solution: Upgrade to latest Joomla! version (1.5.10 or newer).
I had just been able to force myself to upgrade to 1.5.9 two weeks before after much hand-wringing. Moreover, GoDaddy had just moved my site to another server a few days before and the FTP settings were screwy.
But if it’s a security issue, there’s no putting off an upgrade, so I thought I’d do the steps I took in upgrading from 1.5.8 to 1.5.9. But it didn’t go smoothly this time around, because the transfer of my site to another server had messed up GoDaddy’s ability to do an automatic database backup.
Worse, Godaddy’s interface is so configured that if it got stuck at “Pending Backup” there is no way to cancel the process so that I could manually do a backup through phpMyAdmin. It took me a week of several emails to their server administrators to get it all straightened out.
This happened to me because of the unique problems my site was encountering at the time, but you should be fine following the steps in upgrading from 1.5.8 to 1.5.9. But you know what’s even more good news to you?
In mid-April, I was logged into GoDaddy and browsing through the Hosting Connection section when I encountered a notice about upgrading to 1.5.10. Turns out GoDaddy has automated the whole upgrade process. Click once and they will backup your database and php files and then do the install. If something goes wrong, you have the option to revert back to your old set-up.
Next time there’s an upgrade to Joomla! 1.5.11 or 1.6, I just might try this automated upgrade option of GoDaddy. But I’ll also be mentally prepared that if something goes wrong I may have to spend a week exchanging emails with their people.