Joomla 1.5 has reached the end of it’s life and is no longer supported. This means that any security flaws that are found will no longer be fixed and will leave the site wide open to hackers.
Do I have Joomla 1.5?
When logged in to the back end, select Help > System Info from the top menu – or look at the top right hand corner. If it has anything smaller than 2.5 in the areas circled, you are in danger of being hacked.
What can I do?
You have several options, unfortunately none of them are very nice. Probably a good time to look at a complete revamp.
1. Leave the site as it is and hope it’s not going to be hacked
It is highly unlikely that you will be this lucky – unless of course you are getting almost no traffic to your site. Once these vulnerabilities are known, they will be widely publicised to hackers who will hack your site.
2. Upgrade the site to Joomla 2.5
This is an option, however depending on what components, templates etc that have been used, it is not at all straightforward. In many cases, particularly with more complex sites, it’s as much work as starting from scratch.
3. Move to another CMS such as WordPress
This is the course of action we would advise. WordPress is much easier to use than Joomla, and easier to keep secure, and with a clean upgrade and patching system, unlike Joomla. The work involved with moving to Joomla 2.5 is of the same type of cost as moving to WordPress.
If you decide on 2 or 3, contact us and we can help you with whatever solution you decide to go with. We can migrate all your content too, so no need to rewrite everything on your existing site.