Updating Visforms - Some things you should know
According to the motto "Never change a working system" many Joomla! administrators dread to run an update on a working installation, because they fear something might not work properly afterwards. Doing so they make there websites vulnarable to security risks and miss interesting new features that come with the update. In truth it's mostly a lack of experience in creating and restoring backups that prevents them from installing necessary and useful updates. We would like to encourage you strongly to seach this knowledge because it first, is essential for running a secure Joomla! Webseite and second it is not too difficult!
The easiest way to create backups of your website is using the free Joomla! extension Akeeba Backup. Akeeba Backup enables you to create full backups of your website including files, database and restoration script with one click. You can download the backup archive file and restore the website easily. It's immensly powerful to transfer websites to or from local test system or between providers as well. Please take your time and make yourself familiar with this extension.
Visforms Updates are stable and easy
Making Visforms updates as easy and stable as possible is our major aim. Therefore we spend a great deal of time and effort in developing flawless installation and update scripts and test our updates extensively on varying systems, improving the qualitity of our scripts continously.
In addition to installing via the Joomla Update Manager, there is always the option of downloading the installation from our website and installing it manually.
So either download the desired version in the Downloads menu and install it via the extension manager or install updates that are displayed in the update manager.
You can find detailed instructions for installing via the extension manager in our extensive documentation: Instructions for installing via the extension manager
Make a backup before every update
Always create a backup before you start
Although Visforms tries to provide a maximum of security an comfort there is always the posiblity that something goes wrong. That is why you should always create a backup (see above) before you start and make sure that you are able of restoring your website from this backup. (This is also true for any Joomla! core update or any update of any other extenstion).
It's even more save to test the update process on a copy of your website (created in a subfolder on your webspace or on a local test system using Akeeba Backup or any other backup tool).
Log file
Visforms create a log file during installation/update that logs important informations about the installation/update, especially installation/update errors, which do not cause the installation/update to abort. The log file can help to find those errors and fix the installation. If you make the file available for us (in case there where problems during installation/update), we can even try to improve Visforms according to that information.
Usually there is a stable version and a beta version/release candidate
We continuously develop and extend Visforms. That is, why there is usually a stable version and a beta version available. While the stable version is for save use on productive systems, it will be less feature rich than the beta version/release candidate, which you should test thoroughly before using it on a productive system. Only the stable version is distributed with the Joomla! auto updater., so that you will only be informed about stable updates by automatic actions. As soon as the beta version/release candidate is declared stable, it will be added to the update channel for stable updates. The next bunch of new features will create a new beta version/release candidate. Beta versions or release candidates are only available on the download menu of this website.
Template Overrides and Visforms Updates
The development of new features sometime requires profound code refactoring and changes of the view files. Therefore template overrides created on the basis of a specific Visforms version, may no longer work properly after a Visforms update. You have to adapt your template overrides to the changed view files. If template overrides have to be adapted after an update, Visforms will display a message after the update is complete.