Drupal to Joomla CB

[videohead]

I just successfully converted a 500 person Drupal site to Joomla Community Builder.
It took about 30+ queries in phpMyAdmin - took me about 4 hours, and I am not particularly SQL adept.

What a huge difference in performance, usability, and available features!!
I heartily recommend this for any non-profit running Drupal.

The conversion was pretty smooth.
The only missing pieces were passwords (they use different Hash specifications) and the dates for the posts.
So I kept the old site functional so people could look up their old posts, and reset all of the user passwords to 'password'.
Drupal's weird Julien date function is seriously messed up - I honestly couldn't find a conversion utility.
Post here or contact me directly if you need help with this.
Unfotrunately, I didn't keep track of my queries, but I'm pretty sure I could recreate them.
Lots of Insert into from and about 10 inner joins. Not too bad!!

[assur3]

If you don't mind my asking, why did you convert? Joomla is better-looking, easier to use, and has a lot more functionality, but Drupal seems to be a lot faster with a large user base, and has access control and DOM built in. Did your objectives change?

[kgraff]

Hello,

I am working as a volunteer with a non-profit organization http://mitoaction.org/ which is in the process of choosing a CMS to replace the current static site. I set up a basic Joomla! demo http://demo.kgraff.net/cms/ but there is a local developer who only works with Drupal.

I was wondering for people who have worked with both, what factors influenced your decision?

It is reassuring to know that converting between them is possible though.

[a1tsal]

videohead, I would like to hear your reasons too.

I've switched from Joomla to Drupal for building new sites. I am planning to convert a large (>2000 pages, extensive customization) Joomla 1.0 nonprofit site to Drupal when J 1.0 support fades. I don't look forward to that, and it would probably be easier to migrate to a newer Joomla version. However, Drupal's lead over Joomla in functionality looks so large now that it seems unlikely Joomla can compete. In which case it would be better to bite the bullet and move to Drupal sooner rather than later.

If I'm missing something, I'd love to hear about it.

David

[deleted user]

Why do you guys want to use only one web publishing/site management application to build sites? Doesn't it make more sense to use the software that is best suited to the client and the specific project needs? Do you give your clients a choice and some basis for making an informed choice on CMSes? Or are you just doing what you like, or what's easiest for you?

[kgraff]

Why do you guys want to use only one web publishing/site management application to build sites? Doesn't it make more sense to use the software that is best suited to the client and the specific project needs? Do you give your clients a choice and some basis for making an informed choice on CMSes? Or are you just doing what you like, or what's easiest for you?

I actually use several different CMSs, static HTML, plus write my own CGI scripts and use mixtures of all of these. With non-profit organizations things can be complicated. Some of the clients (you seldom have a single client) only care that you use the color blue, while others want to use what they use for the web site their business runs or what their brother-in-law uses, while yet others don't care what you use as long as they are able to edit content easily. Lets not even get into what is involved in changing a logo...

One of the factors in favor for Joomla! originally was that DreamHost has a one-click install for it, so theoretically volunteer committee members could maintain it from the control panel as opposed to hiring someone to apply updates and patches to Drupal. Since I last wrote, the site was "converted" to Drupal, but there were problems attaching a phpBB bulletin board and administering it and other parts of the multi-application site were left without updates. After one part was being defaced every few hours for about a week, the decision was made to put everything into Drupal because that is speciality of the developer who was hired.

One of the frequent rants that I have been getting into lately is that there is no equivalent for web designer to the the kind of certification there is for engineers, physicians, or accountants. If we were to establish such a certification program, certainly there should be a good liberal arts component including psychology and diplomacy. Often the technical details are the easiest part of a job.

[deleted user]

Ha! I like that certification. Yes, the case you describe is clearly bollixed by fundamental problems with client ignorance/inability to grasp the meaning of being a website owner. They prefer to restrict their options, control, and independence by doing whatever their designated web guy is comfortable with. If they have a low budget that may be the best they can get, but it's a setup for being held hostage to inferiority.

Did you disabuse them of the idea that Fantastico (or whatever DreamHost has) can "maintain" anything? Yeah it will "update" whatever it installs usually by breaking much of what you have added...

Is there any kind of Joomla community consensus on Fantastico installs? Drupal people are dead set against it. I think it's safe for one time installations but I'd generally rather not use it as the speed convenience is not that big of a deal and you lose some control over settings. Plus you set yourself up for bogus "update" nagging by email.

[kgraff]

...

Did you disabuse them of the idea that Fantastico (or whatever DreamHost has) can "maintain" anything? Yeah it will "update" whatever it installs usually by breaking much of what you have added...

Is there any kind of Joomla community consensus on Fantastico installs? Drupal people are dead set against it. I think it's safe for one time installations but I'd generally rather not use it as the speed convenience is not that big of a deal and you lose some control over settings. Plus you set yourself up for bogus "update" nagging by email.

Dreamhost uses their own one-click installers, not Fantastico. I moved my personal site to Dreamhost in 2005 and found that for the most part the installers and updaters work quite well. The main exception was one Pligg update for MitoAction's previous site which looked like it didn't take. The one-click update for phpBB from version 2 to 3 worked very well.

I have run several Joomla! installations in demo and test mode. (Yeah, I try to beat things to death before imposing them on clients.) The updates appeared to work quite well, but I found that the one-click upgrade from Joomla! 1.x to 1.5x on Dreamhost also required new themes and the directions were a bit complicated. Subsequent one-click updates have gone well as long as I remember to redo the tweaking of php files to enable users to switch themes on one installation.

As to email nagging, I am getting messages to update Joomla! installations that are no longer there. I suspect that is user error on my part though. I neglected to disable email notification before removing the applications through the one-click installer. The last time I did an install, the Dreamhost default was for email notification off.

A couple months ago Dreamhost started offering Drupal in addition to WordPress and Zenphoto as an Easy Install. They do all the updates and there is no email nagging. They have not offered Drupal as a one-click install. Wonder if that may reflect the Drupal community consensus on installers?

[deleted user]

I've heard a lot of bad things about dreamhost so I've never given them a try. Their support for various FOSS applications I use is attractive, but I wonder how safe one click or easy installers really are. You've had a good experience with them? MediaTemple has one-click installers for Drupal 4.7.6. (!?!?!), Wordpress 2.2.1, and ZenCart 1.3.7. I hope they replace ZenCart with Magento as I am ill-disposed toward all variations of osCommerce, the worst thing I've ever seen in PHP. Running old versions of Drupal and Wordpress seems undesirable and odd too.

If anyone's shopping for low-end hosts, I'm reasonably happy with siteground for cheap stuff, media temple for multiple sites and higher traffic sites, and nexcess.net for low cost and quality--the owners are directly involved in support, no BS communication or pushy sales, and they've configured everything to my needs. They actually suggested running Joomla under suPHP and are the only host I can ever imagine sending links to Joomla developers discussing the merits of FCGI, which I did a while back.

I've never had a truly horrible hosting experience. SG has done some crazy stuff to me but always fixed it in the end. I have had to use BlueHost a few times and it seemed adequate but prone to service disruptions. I never tested their technical support.

[a1tsal]

I have had bad experiences with Fantasico Joomla updating (admittedly two years ago). I would not recommend Fantastico (unless something has improved radically). It is bound to interfere with anything you do that is not completely vanilla.

[deleted user]

Fantastico for updates is obviously risky. I have done that with some nearly empty vanilla demo installations and it wiped out my custom favicon (well Joomla manual installations have done that too) and a bunch of the config settings, including the meta tag info. As far as I understand it, if you haven't hacked the core files, an auto-update should not do any serious damage, like wipe some database tables. I just don't trust it enough to rely on it not doing what it shouldn't do. One time installation, fine. After that, I do it myself while paying close attention to what's being overwritten.

I was mentioning before that I read an old Drupal discussion of Fantastico failing to do proper initial installations--supposedly the sites went haywire days or weeks later. This sounds spurious to me, especially when combined with the "you need a paid expert to do the complex task of installing this app" attitude.

I think you have as much if not more of a chance of missing some files in the manual FTP process than you do with an auto-installer, and the problem should manifest itself pretty clearly--easily solved by uploading all the core files again--if you think that's likely the problem.

[kgraff]

Getting back to the original subject, did you use Joomla! 1.5 with Community Builder running in legacy mode for the conversion? CB was one of the extensions I was interested in trying.