One of the core features of Watchful is the ability manage outdated versions of Joomla add-ons, even including Joomla 1.5.

This includes identifying new add-on versions, notifying site owners, one-click updates, and personalized monitoring like the LESS app.

The addition of remote extension updates to the Joomla core in version 1.6 made much of this functionality possible.

Unfortunately, performance concerns necessitated the addition of a caching mechanism in Joomla itself specifically for extension updates. Clearing the cache and requesting updates became the norm for typical Joomla backend users to obtain fresh information.

And as a result of this cache, Watchful customers experienced a similar problem of stale extension update alerts magnified across all the sites in their Watchful Dashboard.

To address this, we added a Purge Cache button to the Watchful Dashboard in December of 2013, enabling the retrieval of real-time updates in bulk.

But this was only a temporary solution as clearing the cache manually complicates usability.

Today we are thrilled to announce that a permanent solution has been implemented and the Purge Cache button in the Watchful dashboard has been finally removed.

A permanent solution

From the start, it was evident that we needed to find a way to break our dependence on update information provided by remote Joomla sites.

Succinctly, we dedicated the majority of the past year to developing and testing a self-learning database for Joomla extension updates.

As a result, we’ve had a great performance boost as Watchful no longer requests this information from the remote sites.

Furthermore, we have the capability to locally process all real-time updates from our database on our servers, allowing us to promptly determine the necessary updates for a site in real time. As a result, caching is no longer necessary.

What about me?

For Watchful users, the update information in your Watchful dashboard will always be fresh. Purging the cache is no longer necessary.

If you find available updates in the Extension Manager of your Joomla site’s backend that are not visible in Watchful, simply purge the cache. In Joomla 3, you can do this by clicking on the “Find Updates” button.

This is not necessary of course, and over time Joomla will clear the stale updates automatically (when the cache expires).