Lightquick Web Design - Elements of the past and the future combining to make something not quite as good as either

And why should I read the rest of this article? 

The reason you should read on is that if you are an existing Joomla 1.0.15 user then we have an upgrade path for you... If you aren't a Joomla 1.0.15 user but are looking for a good stable technology on which to build your next website then this is for you too.

Joomla! 1.0.15 is a CMS (a content management system) that is free and open source. It allows you to build complex websites and provides an application framework for developers to write programs so that you have access to literally thousands of downloadable programs that will enhance your website. Joomla has been downloaded millions of times and is used throughout the world on countless websites.

Lightquick uses Joomla as its preferred technology for building sites. It is easier, flexible and produces a far more professional look and feel.

The word "Joomla!" is the English spelling of the Swahili word jumla meaning "all together". The Joomla project was initiated in Australia and quickly became the CMS system of choice throughout the world. Much like 'Google', ' Joomla' is a word that you will start to hear more and more of as time goes on and the world wakes up to it's possibilities.

Joomla 1.0.15 was based upon another older CMS called Mambo. This has largely fallen by the wayside as a result of Joomla's success. You can think of Joomla as being Mambo(plus!+). More functionality, more extensions and a very large amount of backward compatibility. Joomla was very successful and stole the limelight altogether but after four years of success something changed...

The Joomla team announced end of life for Joomla 1.0.15 on July 22, 2009 and then moved on to create a totally new CMS based upon upon Joomla 1.0.15 but one that significantly changed the underlying architecture. This was Joomla 1.5. This redesign had some fundamental benefits in that the API framework (application programmers interface) was significantly improved whilst the GUI was updated and restructured. These changes were necessary and benefical.

However, there was a downside. The new version of Joomla was incompatible with the old 1.0.15. To upgrade your website had traditionally been an easy task of applying a patch  - but not this time. The new Joomla required new database tables, changes that could not be accommodated by a patch. Worse than that, the Joomla team could not guarantee that any of the old Joomla 1.0.15 applications would work on Joomla 1.5. A 'legacy' mode was provided but it often did not work and was heavily discouraged in any case. You could be certain that a Joomla 1.0.15 website with many extensions would stop working in at least one major respect after an upgrade.

On top of this the process to migrate was complex, fraught with difficulties and the end result could not be guaranteed. The amount of work it took to complete and the downtime required to do the upgrade meant that many sites have remained in a Joomla 1.0.15 limbo.

So what is the alternative to just leaving your Joomla sites in limbo? There has not been much choice up until recently. Finally though a fork of Joomla 1.0 has borne fruit with a community large enough to keep it going and an active and dynamic development community able to support it. Joostina CMS has come about based upon the good work originally put in by the Joomla development team in the Joomla 1.0.15 product. The Joostina team have taken the Joomla 1.0.15 code as the starting point and have made some major improvements to the administrator interface, enhancing cacheing and making the back-end language independent of the code. Joostina still runs applications/components/modules and mambot/plugins designed for Mambo and Joomla 1.0.15. It runs them natively and does so as well as Joomla ever did. In fact it does it better as all SQL queries have been optimised for speed making for a faster response across the board.

So, at last we now have a possible upgrade path for Joomla 1.0.15 sites. Joomla 1.5 is not necessarily a good path for you as you have to leave so much of your investment behind and duplicate a lot of the work to achieve very little that is actually new. The main thing you do achieve is providing yourself with a supported environment for the future. However, with the coming of Joostina you can be assured of the same level of support for your old Joomla 1.0.15 site without all the lost investment and increased cost.

Joostina's interface is more modern and certainly an improvement over Joomla 1.0.15 The functionality improvements are undoubted, the resulting sites should be faster and there is exciting new functionality that will improve the experience. 

Joostina comes in two versions, 1.2 which is closely related to Joomla 1.0.15 and Joostina 1.3 which is under development. If you want to hear more about Joostina - click here.

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