Beware of Fake Joomla Migrations

A client called us today (around noon) and told us that he’s unable to install a Joomla extension on his website. He said that the installer is displaying an error. He gave us the information to his website (username and password of a super administrator) and emailed us the extension that he was trying to install. Before even logging in to his website, we extracted the extension and looked at its XML setup file to see if the XML is properly formed and that all the files that are listed in the XML file are physically included in the same zip file. Everything looked OK for us. It was really just a small Joomla 2.5 plugin. We then went to the administrator’s login to his website, and before even logging in, we immediately recognized that he had Joomla 1.5 installed. We called him immediately and we told him that he was trying to install a Joomla 2.5 extension on a Joomla 1.5 website, and that’s why it’s not working. To our surprise, he told us “But I have a Joomla 2.5 website” so we told him that we are very confident that what he really has is a Joomla 1.5 website. He said that we are wrong, and that when he logs in to the backend, and checks the Joomla version by going to Help->System Info, he sees Joomla! 2.5.7 as the version. We told him that this is impossible, but then we logged in to the backend of his website, and we were stupefied to see that what he was saying was true – the backend did show Joomla! 2.5.7 but we knew that what he really had was a Joomla 1.5 website.

We called him and asked him whether someone worked on his website recently. He told us that a programmer migrated his website to Joomla 2.5 from Joomla 1.5 a couple of weeks ago – he told us that the programmer finished the job in just one day and charged him about $600. At this point we knew what happened: The programmer faked a Joomla migration by just changing all the references, in the code, from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 – particularly the reference to Joomla 1.5 which is found in the version.php file which is located under the /libraries/joomla directory. We have seen some unethical programmers before – but this one has set new lows when it comes to the ethics of our profession. We will spare you the details of what happened when we told our client what his programmer did.

So how can someone know if his website was really migrated to Joomla 2.5 or not? Easy – all one needs to do is to try to install a Joomla 2.5 extension and see if it works. If it does, then he definitely has Joomla 2.5, if it doesn’t – well, then he still has an older version of Joomla. Oh, and if it does sound too good to be true – then it probably is: don’t believe anyone who tells you that it takes a day or less to migrate a Joomla website – it’s either he’s not really migrating the website or he doesn’t care if your website works at all post-migration. A Joomla migration takes at least 2 full days of work. You have been warned!

If you need to migrate your Joomla website and you’re looking for a trustworthy company to do that for you, then you at the right place. Just contact us and we’ll initiate the migration process as soon as possible. Rest assured that your website will look exactly the same as it was pre-migration when we’re done migrating it. By the way, our fees are very affordable so you don’t really need to worry about setting a huge budget for this project. What are you waiting for?