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Is it time to upgrade to joomla 1.6? |
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Saturday, 28 May 2011 |
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I don't think it is ever really time to upgrade. It all depends upon the
situation. If you have a heavily customised site that is built on J1.0
that works really well, is on a secure server, well backed up and does
the job, what's the point? There are many 000s of J1.0 sites out there
and joomla 1.0 has been forked by others and is till supported by them.
Joomla 1.5 was definitely slower than J1.0 in real use, even with
cacheing enabled, and the justification to the client to upgrade was
never really apparent. Joomla 1.6 has some good features like the nested
categories but still not enough to make my clients take the leap. They
are the ones who need to pay for the work.
For your own site then it is a good idea to move to J1.6 if it is not
heavily customised, if all the extensions are available and all your
URLs can be replicated exactly and you can spare the time. Note that I
said "move to Joomla 1.6" and not upgrade.
The move from J1.0 to j1.5 was a migration and a pretty big one. Bear in
mind my clients had 2-3 J1.0 sites each, each might take quite a few
days to migrate, it was often deemed easier to create the site from
scratch. Lets make it clear - that is a new site that the client has to
pay for or you absorb the time and do it for free.
J1.5 to J1.6 is another migration...not an upgrade.
When I first decided upon Joomla 1.0 as my platform of choice I wish I
had known that the devs were going to break the upgrade process and
create a new CMS instead of upgrading the old in steps. I like joomla, I
don't love it. The pain that is encountered during migration means that
many if not most of my client's sites remain in the main version of
Joomla that they were created in. If I had known this I might have
chosen a different tool from the outset.
I have since created Joomla 1.5 sites as a lot of good extensions work
with it and I can create a fully featured website. I was hoping that the
'upgrade' process would settle down but it hasn't and those sites may be
left in the same state. I am not planning to migrate to J1.6 for a long
while. All my new sites will be in Joomla 1.5 (known technology already
built, tried and tested). I will move to J1.6 when the majority of
extensions are available and support for J1.5 and the extensions becomes
patchy.
I think the upgrade strategy for Joomla is a mistake. There should be no
migrations just upgrades, full backward compatibility should be
maintained, improvements should be made available in small bites, and
the migration tools should be part and parcel of the upgrade. By all
means add functionality, new tables and such like but don't break the
old or give them a workaround. This is evolutionary and I think it is
preferable and justifiable to clients.
Anyhow that's the end of my rant. It's done and dusted now so what I
said is largely irrelevant. It is just nice to get it off my chest.
However, for the future I suggest that you could wait until the next
full stable major release of Joomla (which has been mooted as one that
will not be subject to any future major upheavals requiring further
migrations). But who knows though?
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