There have been a few major issues that have slowed the progress of the migration..
- First off, my 3 year old went and broke his leg ice skating. If you have any kids this age, you can imagine that 4 weeks of carrying him around the house, up and down stairs was a good way to distract from work!
- As explained in a previous post, the strategy I was going to use for the blog pages was to have the content in vanilla Joomla categories and then use JomComment and Phil-Taylor’s Joomla Tags. Unfortunately Joomla Tags had some conflicts with some of the other extensions being used. After going back and reviewing the options for Tags, I decided to go with MyBlog from Azrul. The author process will be more clumsy, but at least the integration with JomComment will be seamless.
- Bugs – Pretty much all of the extensions I wanted to use, JomComment, MyBlog and JoomSuite Content, and even Joomla 1.5 itself had bugs. In every case there was at least one that was a "show-stopper" and had to be fixed before moving on. In all three cases, Phil Taylor, Azrul and Sergey Romanov went out of their way to help me track these issues down.
- Content migration – this has continued to be troublesome. It seems that there are some mismatches in the dates of a clump of articles. After spending some time trying to track this problem down, I decided that it was a huge one and have moved on.
- SEF – One of the biggest problems with the 1.5 site has been SEF. The default built-in SEF isn’t yet working as one would expect. I tried playing around with a third party solution, SmartSEF, while very promising, it broke other things :). Eventually I have sidestepped the problem by relying heavily on MyBlog and its own built in SEF routing for URL’s.
After working through these issues, I think the site is now at a point where I can expose it to the traffic of compassdesigns.net and see how well Joomla 1.5 stands up to it. There are still a bunch of bugs/issues, but I don’t think they are ones that impede usability, my personal litmus test. See if you can find them ;).
Look for an evaluation and comparison of 1.0 to 1.5 in server performance. Coming to a blog post near you!