The Joomla upgrade process
interactive news
Last year Joomla issued a new version to its CMS, and though we looked forward to using its wide array of new features and better designed workflow, we stopped short of recommending upgrades for anyone with an existing installation. Unlike upgrading an application on your computer, the Joomla upgrade presented compatibility issues with extensions installed on your system.
A year later, and it became clear that the developers of just about every major and/or popular Joomla extension had issued versions compatible with Joomla 1.7. Extensions that remained incompatible after that time were either abandoned by their developers or saw their specific features built into the new Joomla version.
Recently, we had the opportunity to upgrade a Joomla 1.5 deployment for Amy Binder, who keeps her site at amyink.com. Amy's relatively simple web presence highlights her copywriting business and includes a bio, writing samples, a history of her career, and samples. Completing the upgrade took us about eight hours.
Amy's site had three incompatible extensions, CSS2Switch, JsIFR, and ExtendedMenu. CSS2Switch allowed us to apply a different style sheet to the same template for a slightly different looking home page. JsIFR utilizes Adobe's Flash to render typography not included in the standard collection of web fonts (e.g. Arial, Georgia, Comic Sans, etc.). And ExtendedMenu gave us the ability to build graphic menus that mimicked the look of the keys on her Macbook. Happily, new built-in features of Joomla 1.7 and version 3 of the Cascading Style Sheet language allowed us to dispose of CSS2Switch and ExtendedMenu extensions, and the availability of Google's webfonts meant we could dismiss JsIFR and all its Flash baggage as well. (To see available Google Fonts, go to http://www.google.com/webfonts).
In the Amy's original site, the home page had a slightly altered layout that featured the large graphic image of the “thought balloon.” With Joomla 1.7, we simply made a duplicate version of the base template, altered the style sheet to accommodate the home page layout, and assign the home menu item to that alternate template.
For the buttons, we utilized CSS3 Webkit tags in the style sheets that tell the browser to render both curved corners and drop shadows. The recreations isn't exact, but it was close enough. As an added bonus, we made "active" versions of the buttons that show the same sky image seen in the thought balloon.
We installed the site back into her original web host using the AkeebaBackup restore function as described here, tested, and made it live. As an added bonus to the process, Amy's site also seems to run snappier under the new Joomla framework and she's had no problem acclimating to Joomla's new, better designed administrative control panel.