Upgrading our Why Joomla? blog

The World Wide Web is about 20 years old this year and since its inception has become increasingly complex on the whole, yet easier to interact with per interface/site - especially if you are a content producer/publisher.  Gone are the days of the 1990s when a website consisted of hand-coded HTML housed in many many seperate pages; more than ever before we are iiberated from needing to know how a system works in order to use it.

However, there do come times when the system needs attention; last week I began thinking about how best to approach a major software upgrade on our Why Joomla blog.  The [old] site was running an archaic and now redundant version of Joomla and, given that its purpose is to discuss best practice when using Joomla software,it needed a major overhaul.  Of course, anxiety buids when first-considering such an overhaul - you see, probably for the past 2 years I hadn't thought at all about the system which allowed me to post to whyjoomla.com and I was now faced with completely replacing it.

The scale of this upgrade was large because recently Joomla has been re-written from the ground-up; its core-team of developers have greatly improved the software's architecture and I was actually excited to take a stab at the upgrade, just so that once done, my workflow as a contributor to the site would be that much easier and more empowered.

As it turns out, my anxieties were somewhat un-warranted; through the process of discovering my best approach to the upgrade I learnt a lot quickly about my options and that it would take a lot less time that I expected. All-in-all, the migration from Joomla 1.0x to the new and improved 1.5 platform took just 2 hours!!  Though, I did speed things up by implementing a new packaged form of Joomla we're releasing soon under the 'Seedling' banner [check back here for more info soon!] - which gave me all the 3rd party tools such as commenting, pre-installed along with our lovely, very simple, new theme.

Increasingly, experiences like this one are suggesting to me that it is becoming easier to understand web systems/software and that on the whole, more end users will be able to get a higher level of functionalty/use from this.  I'll be reflecting on these notions over the next few weeks as we ramp up to releasing Seedling...