Compass Designs .net

You may have noticed that Joomlashack is now running on Joomla Joomla 1.5. We did a stealth migration yesterday.

We had one problem we needed to address, and it took a while to figure out, so we thought we would share the solution for others.

Our old site used Joomla Joomla 1.0, as I have mentioned before, we wanted to make sure we did a 301 redirect of the Joomla URL's so Google would quickly pick up the new ones and pass the pangerank to the new pages. The problem however was that our 1.0 site used the raw URL:

http://www.joomlashack.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=37

We rapidly discovered that mod-write unfortunately will basically ignore all the php parameters here. You can't get rewrite to pay any attention to them.

Some time ago, I posted my answer to the eternal question, Should I use Joomla 1.0 or 1.5? Now there is another factor to consider, Wilco Jansen recently posted on the Developer Team Blog the actual date when Joomla Joomla 1.0 would stop being supported with updates, July 22nd 2009.

"As of July 22, 2009, the Joomla 1.0.x series will no longer be supported."

Over at Copyblogger, Sonia Simone made a recent post about Getting Naked. No, it wasn't a college party, but rather the concept of being honest, sometimes painfully so in your blog. Current wisdom among bloggers is that this is a good standard to follow, you'll see popular bloggers ranging from Dooce, SEOMoz and even Joomla Joomla's Alledia sharing things that traditionally would be thought of as perhaps private. In each case, the sharing has been well received, and all importantly, worthy of traffic.

OK, so in my last post, Live Day 1 SEF URL problems I explained my master plan to do some htaccess redirection for all my old links.

Now, despite my current issue getting data on 404's, I can still make some headway because I *do* know some of the URL's that need redirecting. 

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?

As mentioned in my last post, I have now managed to get a couple of blogging extensions installed and have been pruning my menus. I had planned to re-build these after migration to 1.5 to better fit my new Joomla Joomla Blog concept.

On examining one of the submenus I had not intended to change, I noticed something strange.