Joomla 1.6 - Migrate or Rebuild?
Sunday, 02 January 2011 12:57
I must admit that I'm a touch nervous about the coming months. Joomla 1.6 is about to be released and along with it will come the problems that we all faced when 1.5 was first released.
Back then I didn't change over to 1.5 straight away for numerous reasons. Not least of which that I wasn't convinced that the new platform provided much advantages and until the component producers started upgrading their own extensions, well I wouldn't be able to anyway.
So here we go again! For the vast majority of people building bog standard sites that have content they can edit themselves (the bulk of sites world wide) there won't be much benefit. Also for those of us with existing sites, the thought of migrating will be huge.
In fact some of my own personal sites were only migrated to 1.5 less than 12 months ago. This is mainly due to well... quite simply "couldn't be bothered".
For me there is some simple questions about if I'm to "upgrade" or not (more on the upgrade word later). These are:
Is the site performing well right now?
Is there functional benefits to upgrading?
How many 3rd party extensions does my site use?
Will the 3rd party extensions be 1.6 compatible?
If the site is performing well... then really there isn't much benefit. Many of my larger sites are happily going along and will do for some time. There will be no reason for me to upgrade them... and in fact let's talk about that word.
To my way of thinking the word upgrade of migrate won't even be used when talking about moving from 1.5 to 1.6. The only "migration" will be existing content, layout and maybe menu structure. The rest (being the underlying code) will simply be a complete rebuild.
Therefore to me the only migration path will be can I manually (or via a script) import existing content items... to which the answer is a resounding YES. Menu items I'm not yet sure and as for the template... well I'm sure it will be quite straight forward.
The question of 3rd party extensions is the hardest... if you site has extensive use of these, then I'm sorry to tell you that there probably won't be much of an upgrade/migration path. With the exception of some of the larger players (JomSocial, Anything Digital etc), then I can't see many of the smaller players investing the time to create a migration script. Which will mean that as happened with 1.5, we will probably have to wait for the market to catch up to 1.6
So with all the above, here's what I will be doing. I deliberately haven't even looked at 1.6 till now because I know it's a waste of time for me. Joomla l.5 does for me most of what I need. As for the odd occasion where I need further ACL control I have used either K2 and or Andrew Eddie's excellent Content Manager for Joomla and both have taken up the shortfall in Joomla 1.5. In fact since starting to use Content Manager for Joomla, I really can't see any reason to move to J1.6 for sometime... but I'm happy to be wrong.
With all of this, I thought I would go through the exercise of migrating/upgrading a 1.5 site to 1.6. I will choose a relatively simple site and document my findings.
Wish my luck!.