Compass Designs

So the process of trying to migrate compassdesigns.net started over a month ago with day 1:
Day 1 Uploading and Extracting Joomla 1.5 to ...

Now on Day 36, it looks like we are ready to make a live cut over to the new 1.5 version of the site. OK, so that seems like an awful long time to  get migrated, what have we been doing during that time?

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!