Last month we completed the migration of our main OSTraining.com site to Joomla 2.5.
Members get access to all our video training. That's 1,142 training sessions in Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Coding.
Joomla Tutorials and Blog Posts
Case Study: Migrating from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5
November 06, 2012 |
Joomla Tutorials |
Written by Steve Burge
We learned so much during the migration that we decided to turn it into a case study for others who also wanted to move to 2.5. Our site is a fairly large one with arond 10,000 users, 7000 articles and 60,000 forum posts. Here's an overview of the process we went through to move the site to Joomla 2.5.
Core: SP Upgrade Our team have done several other Joomla 1.5 to 2.5 migrations before and they uniformly recommended SPUpgrade. It does a great job of moving all Joomla's core features from articles and menus to components and modules. We've written a detailed tutorial on using SP Upgrade before so I'd recommend reading that for a detailed explanation of what we did. We did find one thing in this migration that we hadn't seen before. Because our site is large, there were quite a few duplicate menu links, articles and users. Joomla 2.5 is less tolerant of this than 1.5, so SP Upgrade inserts sp- into the alias whenever it found a duplicate link. It took us a whole to untangle these duplicates. It was $30 to purchase SP Upgrade. Forum: Moved from Ninjaboard to Kunena After the migrating the core, the biggest decision we had to make was the forum. We've been using Ninjaboard for the last couple of years, but development on it had stopped. We looked around at the options and decided that Kunena would be our best bet. To move all the forum posts and member information, we used the official Kunena importer and it worked very smoothly. The only tricky part was that we wanted to keep the same URLs that we had with Ninjaboard. To do so, we had to re-write the router.php for Kunena. Kunena has turned out to the best part of the site move. It's powerful but easy-to-use. We've heard almost no complaints from our users so far and our support staff love it. Kunena is the best forum add-on I've tried for any platform. Search: Stayed with Advanced Site Search Joomla's basic search wasn't very good in Joomla 1.5 and didn't get much better in Joomla 2.5. We also tried the Smart Search extension but it wasn't working as well as we would have liked. So, we used Advanced Site Search in Joomla 1.5 and we chose it again for Joomla 2.5. It has a few bugs and hasn't yet been able to pick up our forum posts, but overall it's working very well. Migrating Advanced Site Search simply involved installing the 2.5 version and recreating our settings from the 1.5 site. It did cost us around $50 to buy the 2.5 version. URLs: Stayed with SEF Advance This was a tricky decision. We've been using SEF Advance for our site for years now, since it was the only viable solution for Joomla URLs. The main problem with SEF Advance that it is encrypted. That's obviously not something we're comfortable using on a site called "Open Source Training" and as with all encrypted software, our developers find it very hard to fix problems. However, there SEF Advance did have several advantages that convinced us to keep using it.
Migrating SEF Advance mainly involved installing the 2.5 version and recreating our settings from the 1.5 site. SEF Advance costs €40 for a Joomla 2.5 site. Tutorials: Stayed with Guru We never seriously considered moving our training videos away from Guru. Guru is generally well-written software and we don't find our users have many problems with it. We're also working with the developers to roll out some exciting new features to our training in the next couple of months. Migration was easy, but did involve purchasing a migration tool for around $100. Security: Stayed with Admin Tools and Akeeba Backup This was also a move that we never seriously considered. Admin Tools Professional is the best protection you can get for your Joomla site and Akeeba Backup is a very efficient way to make daily backups. Migrating Admin Tools and Akeeba Backup mainly involved installing the 2.5 version and recreating our settings from the 1.5 site. Admin Tools Professional costs €20 and Akeeba Backup costs €35. Users: Slowly Replacing Community Builder Since the launch of our site, we've been using Community Builder for our user management. Over the last year, we've been reducing the ways in which we use it. Our payments now run through Recurly.com and our user profiles are mainly in Kunena. Still, we haven't fully replaced it on our site yet, so we needed to migrate it over. For moving Community Builder, we used SP Upgrade which handles the Joomla core, but also some popular extensions. Comments: Stayed with JComments Although we use JComments, we did briefly consider moving our comments to Disqus. Disqus is a modern system, but has a major flaw in that all our users would have had to login to the main site and then login separately to post comments. Moving JComments from 1.5 to 2.5 was as simple as moving over the JComments database tables. Payment System: Custom Code We rely heavily on three custom extensions: one for the OSToolbar, one for site membership and one for classroom training. It took around a week for our developer to move these to 2.5, test them thoroughly and migrate the data. Template: Moved from Chameleon to CodeDuring four years of the previous site, we had built up a very messy and convoluted template system. We used the excellent Chameleon to control which templates appeared on which pages, but we needed something simpler. What we did for Joomla 2.5 was create one template for all our needs. First, we set up our CSS that we can use Joomla's page classes. We can decide that part of the site has no sidebar columns by adding a Page Class to the menu link for that page:  The old 1.5 template had huge CSS files that loaded on every page. With the new Joomla 2.5 design we've set it up so that each component has its own CSS that loads only for that component. This has resulted in noticeably faster load times.  Smaller ExtensionsWhen it came to extensions, our final task was moving or replacing a variety of smaller extensions. These included:
With the exception of one of two Nonumber extensions, we simply downloaded the 2.5 version of these and re-created our 1.5 settings. Time and CostWe totaled up the costs of moving such a large site as ours. Here's an approximate breakdown:
The Moving ProcessHere's how we actually did the migration:
The AftermathWith this migration, we didn't aim to make a big splash. Our main goal is was complete the migration smoothly and set us up on the new platform, ready to roll out new features in the next couple of months. So, how did it go? Traffic was my biggest concern. We paid a lot of attention ot making sure our URLs didn't change and that our metadata was correctly setup. It worked. Our traffic in the two weeks after the move was down only 0.03%  Site speed has increased by around 10%. That's good, but made more impressive by the fact that we haven't turned on Joomla's system cache or any CSS compression yet. Initially we didn't turn them on in order to reduce the likelihood of bugs on the site. And in the end, we found some bugs, so we still haven't turned them on.  User experience has been good so far. Despite the new forum, we haven't seen any reduction in the number of forum posts. We've also seen a large number people suggest classes via the new Ideas area. One problem has been the "viewed" feature for videos. With the Joomla 2.5 version of Guru that feature became tied into new features that are about to launch. Our apologies to those people who have been using it. That feature is coming back soon. Bugs have been a problem, but not overwhelmingly so. We mentioned the cache issue already. To be specific, it wasn't playing well with our SSL certificate and so the cache is disabled for now. The main remaining bug is a menu issue. We've found that, only on migrated sites, menu ordering has glitches on 2.5: the menu items sometimes reset again after their order has been changed. This is because the menu ordering is done slightly differently in 2.5. Otherwise, nearly all the bugs we fixed were in extensions or of our own making. ConclusionOverall, I'm glad we made the move. I'm also glad the move is over! 2.5 gives our site a solid platform for the next couple of years and will allow us to roll out several new features in the coming months. Still, I won't lie ... I'm glad the move from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3 will be much easier and quicker. I hope this case study helps you. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask. Look out for our full class on migrating from Joomla 1.5. It's coming later this month. If you're not ready to make the move yet, read our complete guide to staying with older versions. |
Start Online Training
Latest Blog Posts and Tutorials
- Michael Lopp's Keynote from DrupalCon Portland
- Drupal 7 Explained Launches at DrupalCon
- Content Versioning - A Sneak Peek at Joomla's Newest Proposed Feature
- Dries' Keynote at DrupalCon Portland
- Keynote by Karen McGrane at DrupalCon Portland
- Drupal 8 WYSIWYG Editor at DrupalCon Portland
- A Guided Tour of WordPress's wp-config.php File
- Our New WordPress Coding Class is Live
- A Beginners Guide to Drupal Overrides
- Even experts want simpler web software
Blog Categories
Latest Comments
- A Guided Tour of WordPress's wp-config.php File So what to do about moving the file if you're hosting multiple domains on one server...all ...
- Content Versioning - A Sneak Peek at Joomla's Newest Proposed Feature Oh, wow! I've been waiting for this for years. This will make Joomla practically ...
- Content Versioning - A Sneak Peek at Joomla's Newest Proposed Feature Looks very nice :) Can we get it to autosave though? Like wordpress does?
- Content Versioning - A Sneak Peek at Joomla's Newest Proposed Feature Thanks Dave, Andrew, Jon. It's great to hear there's a lot of enthusiasm for this ...
- Content Versioning - A Sneak Peek at Joomla's Newest Proposed Feature Very nice! Features like this will really set Joomla apart in the eyes of "enterprise" ...
The License for Our Tutorials
All of our tutorials are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means:
- You can re-use these tutorials.
- You can modify these tutorials.
- You must link back to our original tutorial.
- You can't use these tutorials commercially.
Open Source Training is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla, WordPress or Drupal projects.
All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright 2013 Open Source Training, LLC. All rights reserved.
Comments
Yes, we literally just selected all of the 2.5 files in our FTP client and dragged them to the main directory.
So long as the database information is correct, Joomla doesn't care what folder it's in. As soon as the files were moved, the new 2.5 site was working.
Yes, to be honest, we expect to be supporting Joomla 1.5 and Drupal 6 for at least another 2 or 3 years. Doing this migrations is expensive.
For lower end clients, hopefully migrations won't take nearly as long as ours did. Probably around 50% of our time was taken up with our custom components and template, something many people don't have. Another 25% was adding new features.
The actual migration itself was probably around 30-40 hours to figure everything out, test thoroughly and then make the migration.
Ed Andrea
As to the earlier comment about moving files to the root I have built sites in sub-folders and simply moved them to the root when a previous site was in existence with no problem.
Rob
Thanks Steve!
(Will you do the same write up when you move to J3.0?) :-)
Roland
I'm moving a client from NB to Kenuna as well. I tried the link to the migration tool but it's dead. Can you supply a replacement link please? and perhaps a short point-form of the process? (where do I install the com?, etc.
Thanks!