There are still a ton of sites out there running Joomla 1.0x and though the new 1.5x platform's been out for some months, many web developers [like you? :) ] are a little daunted by the prospect of moving their old sites over.

Well, like anything, its best to start with some form of roadmap; make a list of what needs to move over and plan your approach by weighting the tasks you think will be most strenuous along a timeline you can deal with.

Migration is actually pretty simple if you consider that your Joomla site basically is just made up of:

1. Category-structures/Articles/Menus/Modules
2. A template/theme
3. Installed 3rd party Extensions (and their data)

I've been a huge fan of Drupal's Content Creation Kit for a long time - its a module that extends the core content functionality of Drupal, allowing you to create different types of 'content' - made up of a variety of fields such as embedded media (photo/video/etc...), email links, html/web links and so on.  CCK's architecture is scalable and allows for 3rd party developers to add new fields to it as additional modules; so the usefullness of CCK grows exponentially in time.

Actually, for a time I saw this amazing module really setting joomla and drupal apart - as, Joomla felt really limited in its potential to grow beyond a CMS and become let's say, an 'application framework.'  However, I'm excited to report today that this is all about to change...

I got a call today from someone who builds sites with Joomla that wasn't sure what the best way to move sites between servers was, and in fact was inquiring about getting designguru to sub-contract the work.... this kind of shocked me at first because its quite a simple process.

Then again, over the years I've become somewhat familiar to shell/unix command prompt plus using ftp and phpmyadmin - all things that may seem daunting to a newbie, so I thought to type up a post with some suggestions for all of you.

Ultimately, a Joomla site is made up of a database and a bunch of files (the core Joomla install + any extensions your specific site has been setup with + extra images etc...) 

I'm going to be brief here, despite the fact that this is my first post in a while and should establish an excuse for my recent negligence in maintaining whyjoomla? :) ...

Part of the reason I haven't been too active in posting is because I've been deeply entrenched in the wonderful world of Drupal .  Its reminded me of something pretty fundamental about Joomla - you see, they're both great CMS' though Drupal is more geared towards online application development (making really custom dynamic sites that use a database characteristically) and Joomla, well, Joomla is really fantastic at being a CMS and taking people beyond blogging. 

It can get daunting, especially for newbies, when trying to plan a new site using Joomla - faced with the over-1300 options for extensions , the abilities of this CMS feel limitless but its important to remember that just because daddy said 'anything in the store' doesn't mean you should get the crystal vase you might break and put your finger prints all over.

I'm going to be turning my attention to posting info that will help people get started with Joomla - those of you who want to build some cool sites which aren't going to make you a web 2.0 gajillionaire but allow you to get geeking with ease...

Till the next post...

q./ 

Because of Joomla's scalability, its really easy to build a site in Joomla that can grow with the demands of its users in time - but is this a set-back of using it?

Perhaps - often the third party extensions, that are so rapidly coming out for J!, are underdeveloped and instead of using them we should look to independant solutions that offer simple content handling as well?  Also, we may tend to jump to using them because we're familiar with J!, when customers might not be and may not need a CMS at all.

Its important to remember that because of Joomla's seperate front and back ends not all site customisations can be done through the front end and I think that's a major indicator that total front end solutions should always be searched for...

Blogs are great tools for quickly publishing snippets information.  Everyone from children to small businesses love them and even large corporates have adopted an emotional relationship to this new catch-word; 'blog.'

What I find pretty funny though is that in the recent rush to get blogging, a lot of people have jumped into platforms like blogger or wordpress without considering scalability.  Now, that's not to denounce the merits of blogging or using a hosted blog service but I think that blogging should just be an aspect of commercial, as well as personal, online presence.

In this series of posts, I'll be examining Joomla as a next-level platform for blogging - that extends the simple function of quick-publishing by allowing articles to be longer and inter-related whilst offering the ability to plug-in additional site features and functions as needs of a website grow beyond verbal diarrhea.