Confessions of Joomla 1.0 Site Owner

Good day, all. I’ve lurked off and on since my SMF days, but this is my first time posting. Someone experienced with CMS development recommended MODx, so I’m taking a closer look.

I am a Joomla 1.0 site owner who got caught up in the J!1.5 transition. My site, which took literally months to customize and will launch within the next three weeks give or take, uses a LOT of custom extensions, including one to bridge Joomla with eFiction. Problem is, with Joomla 2.0 (which is REALLY what Joomla is now, this is a full-on rewrite, NOT an upgrade), my extensions are effectively useless. Yes, I tried the Legacy mode - and failed miserably.

Add to my misery, there is no real migration path for those whose sites consist of more than articles.

Since I have to migrate anyway, I’m seriously considering of breaking out of the Joomla box all together.

That said...

I’m using Community Builder and several third-party extensions. Could someone give me a quick overview of how hard it will be to port extensions over? In the case of Community Builder, is there a similar plugin for MODx? Or, are there SMF plugins where I can take the profile center and extend it somehow?

I technically could stay with Joomla 1.0, but I am really not OK with remaining for too long with what will effectively be a dead platform for much longer.

Thanks in advance for the suggestions.

How easy it would be relies on a number of variables that you haven’t really covered here:

1. What kind of complexity are you dealing with?
2. How much do the extensions hook into Joomla for things like authentication, pagination, dBcalls, etc.
3. Your own level of comfort with software development.
4. How awake you are today versus yesterday, and how much work you want to do.

Coding extensions between CMSs is not entirely unsimilar to working with different programming languages. Sure, some things translate better than others and since there is alot of shared derivative terminalogy you may understand some things quicker than others; but in the end, you are working with a different set of rules altogether.

I can’t imagine that the transition would be copy and paste, but if you were the original author of your extensions, learning how MODx handles access permissions and data calls shouldn’t be that difficult.

I might be wrong, but it makes sense to me.

Hope this helps.