BlogMoving Forward on Joomla
We have a few announcements to make regarding Joomla.
• We will be moving ahead with Joomla 1.0.13. I’ve decided that, while we could probably migrate to Mambo, that it is not an effective solution. We’d be stuck with the same SEO problems Joomla 1.0 has had all along. Namely, we’d still have semi-ugly URLs that lack titles.
• We will migrate to Joomla 1.5, eventually. Our timeframe for this is, basically, when all the components we’re using now are ready. Most are.
And, most importantly…
• We will re-double efforts to prompt Joomla to address ongoing issues with Joomla’s 1.5 release cycle. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be trying the direct approach. If that fails, we will probably be launching a web site of make-or-break grievances with Joomla 1.5.
Bear in mind, we really like Joomla, we have a lot invested in it. However, we simply cannot stand by while bad software is released under the excuse that it doesn’t cost any money. Joomla 1.5 is indeed a good content management system. However, it will fail in the marketplace if legacy backlinks, legacy RSS, and legacy bookmarks are not preserved. Otherwise, such a transition to the site’s reader is not a complete migration… and therefore is not tenable.
I’ve personally taken a lot of heat for this position. And that’s really unfortunate, because we’re the least affected by this. I can hire data entry people to manually code the 2,500+ 301 redirects necessary to make the transition to Joomla 1.5 seamless to our readers (and to Google, Live Search, Yahoo, etc). Smaller sites aren’t, and will either switch and lose popularity, switch to Mambo, or stick with Joomla 1.0 and branch it off into a dead-end project of security patches. Joomla, I don’t believe you will be able to survive that kind of forking.
