“For those people interested in migrating from Joomla! 1.0 please note that this is a continuously evolving process and is likely to be refined and optimized heavily over the next few weeks as feedback is received. There is no immediate need for people to migrate existing Joomla! 1.0 sites to 1.5 so please be patient as we do our best to make the migration process as smooth as possible for the myriad of configurations possible.”
That was the official Joomla.org statement on migrating from Joomla 1.0 to 1.5. There are so many problems with that statement I have to pause and tear it to shreds. I will be using many Mac OS 9 to X analogies, so for those of you not familiar, both products required users to completely migrate their entire experience, code, and platforms.
However, I continue to believe that, the largest difference will be that Joomla will fail because of their migration, whereas Apple executed a perfect migration.
First, “for those interested in migrating”… a product management failure right off the bat. Joomla should be thinking that every site should upgrade, and they should be evangelizing Joomla admins to start looking to making that transaction.
Second, saying that the migration process has issues completely ignores the fact that migration should have been a paramount priority. Apple learned this the hard way, with many people considering Mac OS X 10.1 to be the “first” release of the operating system. The difference here, is that feedback from the Mac OS X Public Beta was largely positive. Feedback about migrating with Joomla has been largely negative (in my opinion).
The difference is that technically-savvy users were comfortable with Mac OS X’s Public Beta. With Joomla, those devoted users aren’t having a happy migrating experience. And, if they aren’t happy, the rest of the user base (right down to the viewers), aren’t likely to either.
Now, in fairness to Joomla, they have changed their tune just a bit. Previously to this announcement, migration wasn’t a priority. They’re saying they plan to make it one. Planning is better than leaving people in the dust, but it still isn’t as good as holding off on releasing until you have things right from the start.
Considering I’ve migrated away from Joomla completely within the month, I’m probably going to stop skewering the project over this. It’s not because I don’t care, I just don’t have the resources to keep pointing out its problems (which would require testing new code). I do hope Joomla gets its act together. But, I can’t take that risk.
With 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 that does mean moving away from Joomla. The team should already be well aware they can’t afford another forking of their code (Mambo, Joomla 1.0, and Joomla 1.5 would be three branches of a single CMS… all now incompatible with one another).
So, my last advice to Joomla (for now), focus bug tracking and all available resources on both the migration code, as well as the core code of Joomla to better handle scenarios of migration. Make sure the transition is transparent to a Joomla site viewer, or else you’ll never win admins over.
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Your comparison is interesting but slightly flawed. In many cases, migration didn’t occur for Mac users…we kept OS 9 running in the background until apps came out that would work natively (some never did). It was some time before Jobs called OS 9 dead….not immediately.
However your comparison is good in describing a complete re-write to Mac users (I’ll be doing that on my site) and also explaining how legacy mode in Joomla is kinda like Classic on a Mac.
Like my Mac migration, I’ll be taking my time and planning it out.
I think my comparison is valid in that regard, because Joomla 1.5 has a legacy mode for older components. Like Mac OS X, Joomla 1.0 code is run in legacy mode, just like Mac OS 9 code was run under Classic.
The problem is, unlike Classic, which ran Mac OS 9 flawlessly in most cases, Joomla’s legacy mode is horribly flawed.
That creates underlying problems like a lack of reliable legacy backlink handling… which means viewers using bookmarks (as well as Google’s crawler) are presented with 404′s instead of content on a migrated site.
But you are right that Apple maintained support for Mac OS 9 during the transition. Joomla has assured security patches for Joomla 1.0 until January 2009. That’s a bit of a mixed blessing… unlike desktop computing, the CMS world is faster-paced, you can quickly lose market share (ask PHP-Nuke).
Joomla will need to have a stable, simple, and proven migration process long before 2009, otherwise I doubt the project will sustain itself.
A funny coincidence that your thoughts are turning to migrating, I have been thinking the same thing.
http://www.compassdesigns.net/joomla-blog/general-joomla/migrating-to-joomla-1.5.html
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