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.