It's been a long month or so. The Man, the Myth, the Legend has been on the Internet for about 10 years now with 6 million page views (counter says 5 million as I restored from a backup). The current rendition of the site started with Joomla 1.1 in 2005. We then migrated to 1.5 which broke a bunch of things (Gallery2 being the big one). Then we upgraded to 1.6 and 1.7. Another migration took us to Joomla! 2.5 which is where we stayed for years. Joomla 2.5 was end-of-lifed on January 1st so there would be no more security updates forcing us to do the big move to Joomla! 3.4.
Recently we were using various pieces of software that had to be updated:
- Joomla 2.5
- Sobi
- Gallery2/Gallery2 bridge
- K2 with Disqus comments
- Docman
The first component I wanted to get rid of was Gallery2 as I was embedding it into Joomla with a bridge. It had a weird single sign-on that sort of worked and felt old and slow. My Gallery2 installation actually pre-dates my Joomla! installation although I don't remember how many years earlier. During one of the upgrades the bridge stopped working so I had to move to JFusion as my bridge. Then Gallery2 stopped being developed which left me dead in the water for updates. About a year ago Ignite Gallery became good enough to migrate to - all 10,000 photos! That process took about a month.
The next component I wanted to get rid of was K2. K2 handled my blogging features, custom fields (which I wasn't using), Disqus comments, tags and more. Originally Joomla! didn't have a lot of blogging features so I tried out a bunch of the commercial offerings such as MyBlog and EasyBlog. One or the other refused to update his component because he didn't like the license change with Joomla! 1.6 so I moved to the other. I eventually moved to K2 as it had real ACLs, tags and hierarchical categories which were missing in early Joomla versions. Joomla 2.5 got us the all of those things so I stopped needing K2 but since I had over 500 articles written in it I was stuck. I recently found a migration plugin that would copy all of my K2 articles to Joomla Articles. It mostly worked.
Docman got replaced with PhocaDownloads which I'm reasonably happy with.
Sobi which I liked got replaced with Sobi2 because they stopped developing the original. Sobi2 has issues from what I can see.
I'm now running on:
- Joomla! 3.4.x
- Native Joomla Articles
- PhocaDownloads
- Sobi2 (for reviews/recipes)
- Disqus plugin
While I was cleaning things up I went through the database and got rid of any tables no longer needed. My database went from 252 tables to 125! Even more amazing the database size went from 160 MB to 20 MB. I've also cleaned up templates, graphics, CSS files, and found replacements for modules and plugins associated with the software above. K2 had it's fingers in everything so it took a while to get rid of it.
I have not spent this amount of time in one spot on this website in 10 years! So far I'm happy with it and you can expect more articles in short succession as I feel OK contributing again. I've just spent the last week optimizing and I'll write another article about that in the future.