Joomla Upgrade

Posted: August 7, 2012 | Categories: Content Management Systems

I'm knee deep into a major upgrade for this site. I've been running it on Joomla 1.5 for years now and I thought it was time to get caught up on Joomla versions. Of course, there's no simple path from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5, so I had to do a migration. There's a cool migration tool called jUpgrade that essentially copies your existing site to a new folder and migrates all of the content. It worked like a champ and I'm in the process of doing all of the clean-up that has to happen.

The biggest reason I'm doing this is to get on the latest version, but to also update the site's look and organization to bring it in line with other sites of its kind. I'm a big fan of the Joomla templates from JoomlaShack (www.joomlashack.com) and had been using a variable width (full width) template layout, but none of the new, more modern templates from them support that layout. Ugh. So, in order to use one of their new fixed-width templates, I had to whack one of the side bars and move everything into a top menu.

I've got that finished and now I'm simply working to reenable all of the features of the site. The comments, attachments, code highlighting add-ons I'd been using with my old site are not compatible with Joomla 2.5, so I have to locate an appropriate substitute and get it implemented. Unfortunately on the attachment and code highlighting side, it means that I'm going to have to go and update all existing articles that leverage those features. Not going to be fun.

Joomla includes a code highlighting module, but I've never been able to find any useful instructions on how to use it. The one I'd been using had different formatters for different languages, so it was pretty useful. Putting code highlighting back in is going to be the hardest part of this.

I'll be writing a post that documents some of my issues with doing this upgrade – stay tuned. The new site should be up in a few weeks.

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Header image: Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash.