When I sat down to build version 2.0 of the Learn Joomla website I found it was a much bigger job than I anticipated.

A little over a year ago, we had a problem with the server that was running the Learn Joomla website.  Two of the 3 hard disks of a RAID5 set failed and the automated monitoring system had failed to warn us when the first disk had gone down. This disaster was compounded when we discovered a problem with the backup system which meant that restoring the sites from the server was a much more complex job than it should have been.  There was a positive outcome from the problems, as we subsequently designed and installed  a new improved High Availability solution in which we have two servers mirroring each other, automatic switchover, and it encouraged us finally to make the move to mirrored Virtual servers throughout using the excellent Open Source Xen software. We also set up better offsite automated backups.   (As a spin off result, we are shortly to expand our specialised Joomla commercial hosting services under the brand 'Best Joomla Hosting'.)  All this took a while to implement however, not surprisingly, and at the time we also sold a large and complex Joomla / SugarCRM portal project to a new client who came on one of our courses, and we had other clients to look after too. While the income from this project was welcome, it was in hindsight a distraction from our core business.  But it all meant that the Learn Joomla project got neglected.

Learn Joomla was launched as a beginners Ebook for Joomla 1.0, which subsequently became 1.5 and then we added training and other services after demand from our customers.  But the original site was built on Joomla 1.0, and even after the release of the the Joomla 1.5 Ebook the website remained on Joomla 1.0 as other priorities kept getting in the way and the website was still working well.  After the crash and a period offline, it became increasing important to upgrade the website, as many of the extensions were becoming outdated, particularly after the huge row within Joomla over commercial extension developers, the GPL licence et al.  The Ebook also needed quite a lot of updating for the same reason.  But the migration and rebuilding of the LJ site was a big job and getting bigger as the weeks passed and the Joomla environment changed and the migration kept being put off under commercial pressure from our web development clients.  Earlier this year our big client suddenly decided to move the maintenance of the project we had developed for them to an Asian company to save money, and we found ourselves again with time on our hands.  The Learn Joomla 2.0 project was about to get going again.

We realised everything had to be reworked.  The design was over 3 years old and had been superseded by the new Web 2.0 'look'. Our forum was still running on JoomlaBoard, (Fireboard had come and gone) and the latest forum was Kuena. The Virtuemart shop had released a whole new version.  Our free templates looked old fashioned and we needed new ones, and of course we were still on Joomla 1.0.  Some prioritisation was needed.

One of the biggest bugbears for anyone with a Joomla site with a lot of content is the way that the developers have neglected to make the software upgradeable. At each major version release the software has changed significantly (in 1.5 although sections and categories remained and the look and feel was similar, the data structure changed and hence no upgrade path.  This has been repeated again for Joomla 1.6.) So our biggest problem was to move the content and structure to 1.5.  In view of our limited resources we concentrated on content.  Building a modern template from scratch with the range of functionality and design is a big undertaking, and so we took a decision that we would use a commercial template for the relaunch and build our own template in the summer/autumn.  We eventually chose Joomlart's JA_Social.  It's proved OK in many ways but has a number of annoyances. It's very heavy on code and recompiles the CSS occasionally. Surprisingly it also lacks module header variations.  So while it solved the problem visually, it reminded me again why we normally build a custom template.

To migrate our content and users from 1.0 to 1.5 we used the excellent mtwMigrator. However we ran into one big problem - our forum data was in JoomlaBoard, and mtwMigrator only migrated Fireboard. A quick check on the Fireboard website showed that the tools for migrating Joomlaboard to Fireboard had been removed from the developers website as the product is no longer actively supported. It took several hours of Googling and searching to track down all the bits and pieces needs from other people's sites and forum.  (I'll add these to our new archive vault of old software, another new feature of the site we will add soon).  So we set up a copy of the 1.0 website, and a new clean 1.5 website install. First we migrated Joomlaboard to Fireboard, then we installed new versions of all the software we would be using  (Virtuemart, Kuena, etc) on the new clean 1.5 site, and then we set off mtwMigrator. It was fast and quick - and it worked. All our old articles and users were copied and there was data in the forum and the shop.  However all the modules plugins etc had to be reset up manually. Tools such as Google Analytics were set up manually again from scratch (the first website had Analytics built into the template).

From this point however we were in for a few solid weeks of manual editing and tweaking of our data, including the articles, the shop products and information (we had to rebuild the shop and repopulate most of the data). All told it was like building a new website, albeit with some imported data.  And there was more. It is now de rigeur that all sites are connected to social networking, so we had to set up Facebook and Twitter pages and connect these up together with LinkedIn.  For our Blog we decided to use K2. However in hindsight K2 is overkill for what we want, overly complex, un documented and sets up an alternative article system which isn't ideal. We plan to switch to Joomlaworks simpler (but commercial) SuperBlogger, which I have used on another site. It uses standard Joomla articles, is much simpler to set up, and adds Disqus comments and Twitter?Facebook linking as standard without all the K2 overhead requirements of templating and configuring.  We also discovered the need for a book on 'K2 for beginners' in the course of events!

Finally we concentated on presentation. JA_Social has it's own rather primative slide show extension. We decided we needed to give more front page weighting to out popular training course, so a slideshow was called for. This is one of the weakest parts of the JA offer and will be replaced when we do our custom template.  But finally it was all done.

The last decision was what to do about our mailing list. While I was very fond of the original Acajoom News, after a trial of Web Chimp (now integrated into Joomla with a great plugin), I realised Webchimp would help us manage our planned new monthy newsletter with much less effort, and so the final decision was made.

I've learnt a valuable lesson from the episode which is to know what my priorities are. I enjoy Learn Joomla: writing the books, giving the training and working with our customers, and I won't neglect it a second time. Time to put the site live and see if there is still anyone out there?