Updating a huge number of Joomla sites

Question

Joomla 1.5 will end its life in the short term, and many sites will be upgraded to version 1.7 or 2.5. We are trying to figure out how we can update our sites. Unfortunately, Joomla developers who do an excellent job have not kept backward compatibility high on their list of requirements.

We know that there are many resources that describe how to port a Joomla site to version X from version 1.5. But in our company we have about 120 Joomla sites. With all the migration steps that need to be done with the templates, custom written code, and the third-party modules that we use, it would be nice to complete the migration. Therefore, we are studying methods and techniques that will facilitate our (updated) work.

I can’t imagine that we are the only one with this problem, so I’m looking for more information about moving these sites on a large scale. We cannot be the only ones struggling with this.

To give some details, to update minor versions, we used the phar and composer techniques to create the project. If we can successfully create php joomla as a library and put custom development on another phar, updating should be as simple as replacing phar. Third-party modules should also be archived to the phar for easy updating as well. If the modules do not support this, we are going to talk about ourselves.

Of course, we know that Joomla has a new integrated update mechanism. We are studying this mechanism, but we doubt that we can use it, since we have some custom fixes for the functionality of the kernel or module.

To summarize this post, we have two problems with which we would like to receive feedback.

• How could you upgrade more than 120 sites to the latest version of Joomla.
• How do you manage Joomla updates if you have a large number of Joomla sites to support

Answer 1

The bad news is that there is no automatic way to upgrade from Joomla 1.5 to 2.5, as the changes are so dramatic that they are almost like day and night. The template changes are such that you may have to rewrite them from scratch. Don't forget that 2.5 does a few things differently, so you might also encounter a learning curve.

My suggestion would be to have a multi-level migration plan and migrate only those sites that you need, or can justify the costs of migration as components, modules and plugins that you use.

In this case, you need to follow the release schedule, which provides a long-term release every 18 months, each of which is likely to cancel backward compatibility with previous versions, so that you get sites at 1,5, 2,5, 3. x and t .d.

Answer 2

I believe that phar can be used to distribute a new updated version - but that will not help you in the upgrade process itself.

My (painful) experience with the transition from 1.5 to 1.7 taught me that not only changes in the code were dramatic, but also changes in the database (structure!), ACL implementation, etc. etc. The pattern is likely to be the least of your problems.

My question is to you, why do you want to update ALL websites? if a particular website needs tools / plugins available only on higher versions of Joomla, then I think this is a good enough reason. But for updating all websites there will be, as you expect, a project from hell ...