If you’re using Joomla 2.5, then we have news for you, it is now time to migrate to Joomla 3. “Why?”, we hear you ask. Well, because by the end of December, Joomla 2.5 will no longer be officially support it (we will still support it at itoctopus though). This means that Joomla 2.5 will become like Joomla 1.5.26, vulnerable, exploitable, and weak. You wouldn’t want your website to run on Joomla 1.5.26, would you?
But isn’t Joomla 3 unreliable?
A few months ago, we were completely against migrating to Joomla 3, simply because the CMS wasn’t mature enough. However, as of July of this year, Joomla 3 has become very stable and we are installing it for our new customers. We are also migrating our old customers to it. By the end of 2014, we are planning to migrate all our large clients to Joomla 3.
Although the migration from Joomla 2.5 to Joomla 3 is not as hard as migrating from Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5, there are still challenges, especially on large websites, so we suggest that you plan the migration carefully and that you schedule it to take place on October (2 months before the deprecation of Joomla 2.5).
Things to remember before doing any migration:
- Make sure you backup the filesystem: All the files under the root directory of your website must be backed up into an archive. Using Akeeba will not backup the whole filesytem so you shouldn’t use it.
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Make sure you backup your database: The database should be backed up at the same time you are doing the filesystem backup, or else your data will not be consistent. Note that can easily download a backup of both your filesystem and your database using cPanel’s Backup and Restore functionality (if you’re using cPanel/WHM).
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Make sure that you lock all changes to your website: The moment you start the backup process, you should disallow any changes to your website until the whole migration is done.
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Make sure you surround yourself with the right technical people: It is always a good idea to have the contact information of some Joomla experts (such as, ahem, itoctopus) ready in case you run into any issues during the migration process.
If you want help migrating your website to Joomla 3 (even if you have a very old version of Joomla – yes, including Joomla 1.0), then you’ve come to the right place. Just contact us and we’ll do it for you as fast as we can and for a very affordable fee – and the best part is that you won’t even notice that your website has been migrated (that’s how good we are)!