Thanks to a few WordPress plug-ins, we’ve done it. We have PhoneNews.com running on WordPress. It took 5 hours to do the job. Oh, did I mention we preserved legacy backlinks as well?
No, it isn’t online yet… we have to get the look-and-feel up, and then find a nice 48 hour period where all sleep can be abandoned…
This is not a lovefest on WordPress, nor is it really about PhoneNews.com. This post is a clear warning about Joomla: The project is running itself into the ground.
Joomla 1.5 still is a painful migration process with hundreds of bugs. In five hours, I managed to have a pure, yet massive Joomla 1.0 web site running flawlessly on WordPress. Legacy backlinks preserved, and with the new URL format too. The folks over at Joomla 1.5 have so many bugs, the testers are refusing to test it. Did I mention they’re already on Release Candidate 3, and saying there will only be one more RC build before release?
If I were leading up Joomla, I would slam on the breaks. Right now. I would refine the goals of the project down to three key goals at this point. Those would be first, stabalizing the Joomla code so that all glaring issues are fixed. Second, ensure that all Joomla sites can easily migrate from version 1.0 to 1.5. And, finally, ensure that Joomla site viewers do not notice any changes due to the migration. Bookmarks, backlinks, and all resources that were furnished by Joomla 1.0 core software, must work without the end-user needing to do anything.
It simply is not acceptable to release Joomla 1.5 without doing this. No, I don’t care if it’s free software. I don’t care if you want to hide behind an open source license and claim that’s a valid objection. Bad software will fail, and it doesn’t matter what you charge for it.
Please Joomla, even though you’ve already lost me as a supporter, don’t commit suicide in the marketplace. Right now, I’m suggesting all Joomla 1.0 web sites migrate to WordPress. It’s faster, and easier, and more backwards-compatible than Joomla 1.5. If that sounds hideous on Halloween, well, it’s no trick, and it’s no treat. Joomla 1.5, as it stands now, is a failure. Hopefully enough leaders on the team will hit the breaks and delay the release until they get back on-track.
You might also like...
Good grief, Joomla 1.5 is not even FINISHED and you’ve declared it a failure! Maybe you don’t understand the iterative process of open source development.
It seems that jumping up and down screaming about things must have worked for you at some point in your life, but the development of open source software involves cooperation and collaboration with other people in a productive manner. Temper tantrums don’t really accomplish much.
Joomla 1.0 isn’t broken, what’s your hurry to leave it? Joomla 1.5 isn’t final, what’s your hurry to declare it dead?
Frankly, if you can calm yourself enough to articulate your needs to the development team, one of them will probably address your needs. If you just act like child, it will take longer.
Open source, as built, is not the perfect solution for everyone. There are thousands of companies that take open source software and then PAY PROGRAMMERS to customize it for them. They consider it to be a competitive advantage to have customized software. If your business model depends on open source that conforms precisely to your specs, you’re going to have to either collaborate with the open source programmers, pay someone to customize it, or find another solution and move. It looks like you’ve chosen the latter and have also chosen to attack people who didn’t immediately jump to your beck and call when you threw a fit. Not very adult of you.
@cryingout: if you follow Joomla’s development closely (especially with regards to 1.5), and other opensource (successful ones) projects, you’ll realize your sensitive-and-over-eager-to-rebute comment is pulling stuff out of thin air. But I’m not about to enter any technicalities, so that’s that. (RC5 with more core changes, anyone?)
@Chris: Totally agree with you, ‘cept the part about it being easy to port to WP. As you’ve probably know, that isn’t possible for many Joomla site. I’d say a port to mambo at this point would’ve been better, and much easier too.
I guess I could post a migration guide… we had PhoneNews.com (a 2000+ article site running on a test server), converted to WordPress in a mere few hours. That includes backlink fowarding (albeit not perfect… but it will keep search engines happy).
Porting Joomla to WordPress is a very viable option, there is already a functional conversion script out there, and combined with Advanced Permalinks… backlinks can be migrated. The same can’t be said about Joomla 1.0 SEF links to 1.5.
I realize many at this point are going to give Joomla 1.5 a go, and I hope they do. We tried to isolate what would make it better. We brought up the critical issue of legacy backlinks, and many chose to shoot the messenger.
Still, I stand by what I said, we worked on migrating PhoneNews.com from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5, and to WordPress. It was easier to get PhoneNews.com up-and-running on WordPress than 1.5. And, we now have a reliable site with final code that is not forked, slow, or needing major revisions.
As to the Mambo option, I really don’t see things as being rosier over there. While Mambo’s team is following a logical upgrade path, unfortunately, the Joomla fork has left them in a much smaller community. The room for improvement will be stifled until Joomla either becomes radically different… or fails to be migrate-able (and it still is for the most part). Putting a Joomla 1.0 site on Mambo would just mean having to pencil in another transition down the road I’m afraid. At least with WordPress it is unlikely things will require transition within the next few years. Of course, a few years ago, the same might have been said about Mambo…
P.S. Joomla’s core team can’t have it both ways. Either RC3 is feature-complete and nothing new will be added, or it is unfinished and they’re going to work on addressing these problems. It seems whenever I raise the issue… I get one of the two polar opposite responses. Yet another sign of failing product management, unfortunately.
[...] it still being easier to migrate Joomla 1.0 to WordPress than to Joomla 1.5, I have to say, I still suggest users take the path of least resistance, and [...]
I am still developing my new site, which is Joomla 1.5. I tested and learnt with 1.0 to ease my learning curve with 1.5. With the bad vibes that were sent through the joomla community, I was rattled and started looking at viable options in case Joomla 1.5 fell through. I decided to calm myself down like most Joomla 1.0 developers and worked on some other projects of mine.
During that time I looked at several popular CMS, but none even compared to Joomla. Joomla has one of the best communities compared to all other CMS. Out of all the cms out there Joomla has more extensions available that actually work, and also work in conjunction with others, because of the hard work between the community and developers.
Sure most of them don’t work with Joomla 1.5, but every week I see more and more getting updated for 1.5. I’m glad that joomla took as much time as they did to get 1.5 stable. It sucked waiting, but is well worth it now. Plus now that it is stable developers are now seeing that their extensions are heavily needed and wanted so they are beginning to work on them now.
And for the author of this post, if you are able to use wordpress for your needs why oh why did you even use Joomla. Sure you can use it for a blog type site, but it actually is just to bulky for a blog.
For instance theres is no reason buying a sports car if you don’t ever go over the speed limit or take corners really fast and theres no reason to buy a big 4X4 truck if your never going to take it in the mud or snow. You be better off with a 4cyl car with a detachable trailer, which would be wordpress with all the simple plugins available. If you need content, link directory, buisiness directory, forum, ecommerce, community, auction and classifieds etc.. you better get the 4×4 and go with Joomla.
Also you wouldn’t go to a factory and try to test drive a car that is in the middle of being assembled would you? You might get a feel for the car, but it probably won’t work correctly. And if its a newer model car, you won’t find any parts for it until there are several thousands of them on the road creating a higher demand for custom parts.
If the developers of that car just threw it together as fast as they can just because people in the community are griping that it is taking them to long it will probably fall apart or fail right when the community needs it most. This would really create a bad situation and could end the life of the car manufacture. So to prevent something like this joomla took extra time to ensure they had the joomla framework perfect. And hey if they are going to spend 2 years working and planning a project I would want to ensure my hard work is protected, so they got together with lawyers to come up with a solution to protect it for the longevity of the project to protect against another fallout like they did with mambo. Its hard to spend a good portion of your life working on something and have your baby taken from you or be prevented from moving forward on the project to newer and better things. I praise the Joomla devs for their hard decision to leave mambo, and praise them even more with there new development of 1.5 joomla and taking extra steps to ensure their baby is protected to benefit the whole community.
Sure mambo is good, but it seems like they don’t want to move on. In todays world if you don’t keep moving ahead with your technology you will get out done and you will no longer hold that top spot on the technological curve. You should never live by the old saying “If it isn’t broke don’t fix it” Sorry but this just doesn’t work In the technology world. I think it funny how mambo is now starting to say they are going to develop a all new mambo now that the new joomla is out and breathing. Can you say SCARED!!! They should have done that years ago, now they are going to chase joomla since the devs of joomla really now what people want to see in a CMS. The only next viable option to joomla is MODx. If MODx was had a bigger community and was more mature I would have gone with it, but since it isn’t yet, Joomla 1.5 it the best route.
Hi guys, how do you migrate from Joomla! 1.5 to WordPress without having to say goodbye to your articles and posts? I realise now that Joomla! 1.5 is really not a good blogging platform. WordPress will be much easier to use, I think. Thanks for the nice helps!
I would be interested in that post on how you migrated your site from Joomla to WordPress. I’m a developer newbie to both platforms, but would like to learn both as for website development.
Hi there. I agree with you about Joomla’s failure to maintain a streamlined project direction. I find it worrisome that there are two forks of it with 1.0x and 1.5x… What’s worse is that there is no easy-to-implement migration tool from 1.0 to 1.5, and as of now, many component designers and template designers are only developing for the 1.5 platform…
I would definitely love to migrate my site to wordpress, but haven’t found a way to move the users over along with the content (for which there is a very good working migration script). I’ll also likely lose my forums, which is fine, as they’ve been inactive for a while…
Is there any chance you’d be willing to post your migration steps?
Thanks,
Dan
I plan to… some day I get a chance :)
It’s pretty simple though. There is a Joomla 1.0 to WordPress 2.1 bridge out there. So, you simply download the last release of WordPress 2.1, and use that to migrate your Joomla 1.0 site.
I don’t have the link on me for that script, it’s on a few pages… unfortunately the original page for it has vanished. If you can’t find it, post back and I’ll dig up my copy from archives.
Then (once everything is up-and-running on WP 2.1), update WordPress from 2.1 to the latest version. Presto! You have Joomla 1.0 migrated to WordPress’s latest.
Now, this won’t migrate comments or users. Just articles. For users, you may want to install IP.Board or PHPbb and import users from Joomla to that… especially if you have a large userbase that you want to maintain. There isn’t any easy way to migrate Joomla users to WordPress, unfortunately.
The link for the script is http://rangit.com/software/6-steps-how-to-migrate-from-joomla-to-wordpress/
So, you think installing a forum, converting my joomla users to it, then “uploading” those users to wordpress by way of a phpbb bridge to wordpress?
I guess comments will be a problem, but I’m willing to sacrifice them for the overall improvement of my site… There’s gotta be some simple way to migrate those too, perhaps with NAVCAT or something of that nature… I will have to look into the db structure of JOM_COMMENT for that…
Thanks for the quick reply Chris!
Dan
Well, at PhoneNews.com, we never migrated our userbase back into WordPress. We had Joomla and IP.Board in-sync with one-another. Since switching to WordPress, the users are loaded into the forums, and we have disabled the need for a login on the WordPress-side.
What we’re waiting for is IP.Converge to allow for cross-login between WordPress and IP.Board, but it isn’t really a priority. We don’t have a need for logins right now over there.
A JomComment migration path would be nice, the problem though is that it would have to be integrated into the original migration script (or, at the least, the original script would have to be updated to match article-id across both versions). Right now, the migration script doesn’t line up article IDs.
Also, 301 redirects are a royal pain. At PhoneNews.com, we wrote over 1,000 by hand. We’ve held off on writing the other 1,200 because of low SEO value. Some day I might right them just for the sake of accomplishment… Joomla still gives me a headache when I remember it :)
Chris,
I understand your angst at Joomla at least at the time of your post. At the time it was written, it looked like some of your fears about Joomla 1.5 as a development disaster were justified, even if they came to nothing in retrospect.
However, I can tell you as a fellow web developer who uses both Joomla and WordPress, that Joomla is a superior solution in terms of flexibility. (I say that with all due respect to WP, as I love that community as well) And now that “time has told,” Joomla 1.5 is finally hitting it’s stride with more great features on the way. As one commenter stated, it was “worth the wait.”
There are two things I’d like to see with regard to Joomla. (1) an easy update tool from 1.0 to 1.5, and (2) an easy way to convert WP to Joomla without losing all my links. But as you know, very few things in this business come easy. There are a lot of 1.0 sites out there and without an easy way to upgrade they will likely remain that way. Such a proposition is a bit scary in lieu of vulnerabilities which have now been found in those earlier releases and which are well documented.
Anyway, thanks for the salient commentary and good luck in your future endeavors.
I don’t really think it’s necessary to nit pick about which CMS is “best”. There are some people that still love their PHP-Nuke derrivatives.
However, if Joomla can’t keep their userbase on a single platform, it will hurt them in the long run, and they will lose any clear superiority with the passage of time.
The fact that Joomla has been “hitting its stride” while “giving the finger” to 1.0 users, pretty much confirms what I wrote at the time.
Would Apple be where it is today, if they had told OS 9 users to jump off a cliff? Imagine the slow speed that OS X would have been adopted… and imagine how Apple wouldn’t have had the resources to build iPhone, iPod touch, Apple TV, and all the other crazy OS X-based devices in the pipeline.
I’m a Joomla 1.0 site owner who has been on the receiving end of “the finger”. :)
I am relieved to see that I’m not the only one who is coming to this conclusion regarding the project overall. The site I am about to deploy cannot easily migrate to J!1.5 due to the sheer number of custom or customized extensions that the site is using. Ironically enough, I don’t really use Joomla for the content, but for the framework (especially the plugin architecture).
I’ve been researching alternatives, and, for my near-future projects, WordPress MU with BuddyPress is lookin’ REALLY good. Anyone have experience with WPMU and BuddyPress? Also, I have Joomla extensions that would need to be reprogrammed in WordPress. Anyone have experience doing this? What’s it like? Thanks!
WPMU is good, but you should probably get the hang of WordPress first. At MechaWorks, we have over a dozen WordPress installs, and they’re all easy to manage separately.
The good news is that WPMU and WordPress proper are set to merge eventually… so no matter which you start with, you’ll be on the same platform. And, unlike Joomla, Automattic leaves no blog behind. Sorry, couldn’t resist.
In terms of functionality, there’s very little that WordPress extensions can’t do, compared to Joomla. Of course, the API is completely different, so your extensions will need considerable re-writing.
Sorry for the late response. I’ve set up WPMU with BuddyPress on my development server (yes, I’m a bit of a masochist). With some minor glitches (the whole localhost.localdomain issue), I got it all up and running fairly quickly for a total noob. So far, I’m impressed by the potential of this platform, and I was stunned by the sheer mass of plugins that are freely available (even more than the JED).
The only thing right now that is stopping me from full on running from Joomla is converting a critical component I have from Joomla to WP API. Is there some sort of “API Cookbook” out there? I can’t believe I’m the only one who is trying to do this.
*sigh* – all of this because of lack of backwards compatibility (and NO, Legacy Mode DOES NOT work very well, even for 1.0 extensions that don’t have errors, especially if your solution involves a component AND mambot).
How long did it take you to write this blog.
Funny, 4 years later and Joomla is still alive and kicking WordPress up and down the field…
… unless you just need a blog – then WordPress is a pretty easy way for a “designer” to call themselves a web developer.
Anyway, would be interested in knowing how you’re feeling about the transfer at this point.
-h
Switching to WordPress sits at one of the top 10 best calls I’ve ever made in online journalism. Zero regrets.
P.S. I never said Joomla wasn’t alive-and-kicking… I’ll defer to the last paragraph of this circa-2007 post. From what I’ve heard, Joomla has worked to improve the migration for its original user base, though Joomla is a shell of what it once was.