Joomla is the Content Management System that I chose thirteen years ago to run my websites.  I write an article and add a couple pictures on the backend, and Joomla sticks it into a database and posts it on the internet for all to see.

When I started the website in 2007, mostly as the info page for the wedding, the current version of Joomla was 1-something.  Over the next couple years, I was able to update through the V1 series.  In 2012, V2.5 was released.  I was able to upgrade to it without much trouble.  And that's where it's been ever since.

Late in 2012, V3 was released.  There had been test versions for a couple years because it had changes that weren't backward compatible.  I don't run a very complicated website, but I still could not easily upgrade to newer version.  I had tried a couple times with varying degrees of success, but it never worked fully.  V2 was supported until the end of 2014.  Since then, there have been no security updates to V2.  Not that my website is much of a target.

A couple years ago, I contacted a guy in Texas who I found through the internet.  I forget exactly how much he said it would cost, but it was in the handful-of-hundreds range.  Then, last week, I found a website called Fiverr where you can hire people to do one-off jobs.  I posted asking if anybody would upgrade my website and received a dozen-ish offers overnight.  I picked a guy in India named Sushil.  He has a Comp Sci Masters degree.  I don't know if he has a regular job, but he's very experienced with all sorts of websites and upgraded mine in prob'ly way-less than a day.

Joomla 3.10 will be released sometime this or next year.  It will be the last V3 release.  But it will be receive Long Term Support, so it will receive updates for a couple years.  It's also supposed to be a "bridge" to V4.  There are already test versions of V4 out.  I hope to be able to upgrade to it myself when it is officially released.

So now, I have the current version of Joomla running on the current version of CentOS running the current versions of Apache, PHP, and MariaDB.  I should be good for a while.